I am giving a tutorial and a presentation on putting predictive analytics to work at the forthcoming Predictive Analytics World show in Washington DC (October 20th-21st with tutorials on the 19th). I always like to illustrate my points with real examples and I am going to be talking about Premier Bankcard, a SAS client. As [...]
decision tree
clario Analytics was founded back in 2002 largely by folks from Fingerhut. The team had been working on mailstream optimization – how to manage catalogs. The best customers of a catalog marketer can get literally 100 catalogs per year and this is not good. Initially a consulting company they raised money in 2006 and launched [...]
Angoss has just released a new version of their data mining and predictive analytics software, version 7.0. Key themes for 7 were: Optimization Mining enhancements like data weighting, in-database analytics, new statistics Support for more complex IT environments Usability Angoss has long supported the development of strategies or decision trees – models that define the [...]
Back in March FICO released 6.7 of their BRMS Blaze Advisor. I got a chance to catch up with the release just recently. The focus of this release was the business user experience – an improved out of the box experience for business users. The business user experience has become increasingly critical as business users [...]
I got a chance to sit down with Rob Walker last week for an update on Chordiant Decision Manager. Rob covered some of the new features in Chordiant Decision Management 6.2 as well as some general background that has not appeared in any of my posts before (check out First Look – Chordiant Decision Management [...]
Delta-R‘s product onRules is Java-based, service oriented application. Based on open source like the Spring, Hibernate, Java Server Faces r UI, Groovy for scripting etc. It is fully web based – thin client – and the resulting services are deployed as web services. It is available in English and Spanish. The software starts with a [...]
I got a chance to chat with the folks from KNIME recently to discuss their workbench. KNIME is essentially a workbench to define the pipeline of operations you want throw at your data, typically as part of doing analytic work. It allows you to do complex things to the data and document your process – [...]
Decision Management Solutions attended the Santa Clara Cloudforce 2009 event yesterday and heard CEO Marc Benioff present “Welcome to the Real-time Cloud” in which he introduced some great features in their spring 2009 release and demonstrated, once again, that salesforce.com is paying attention. Salesforce.com has clearly realized that the next step for enterprise applications like [...]
I got a chance to look at a new decision product this week – Incanto from Qualia Systems in the UK. Incanto is a decision modeling tool and the founders of the company describe their objective as providing both a “scribble pad” where you could have a continual development process, moving pieces around until what [...]
One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. People want to know so they can design their system and so they can manage change. I recently got a request for a link to a post describing the difference and I realize that, though I have lots of posts [...]
I sat down with Innovations Software Technology, now part of the Bosch group, to get my first good look at Visual Rules in a while. Release 4.4 is the current version (they released 4.3 in November and 4.4 just this week). The tool is written in Java and based on Eclipse. About half their users [...]
I recently got a chance to discuss EpiAnalytics product offerings and see a brief demonstration. EpiAnalytics provides contact center analytics to improve customer service and technical support business processes using analytics (including text analytics) and decision automation to automate the manual analysis of leads and support emails. The results are then plugged into an engine [...]
Mike Gualtieri published a nice piece on business rules engine algorithms last July that I wanted to point out to my readers. Mike summarizes the mainstream rules engine algorithms into those that deliver inferencing at run time, those that execute…
Blaze Advisor 6.6 is an incremental release to Fair Isaac’s business rules management system that has just become available. As Fair Isaac has used the product more extensively as the basis for its decisioning applications its own experience has driven a variety of useful features and this, combined with the Blaze Advisor team’s usual focus [...]
Charlie Berger of Oracle presented on Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM). Charlie joined Oracle from Thinking Machines about a decade ago and have been putting machine learning algorithms into the Oracle kernel. Data Mining, in database or otherwise, sifts through data to find hidden patterns, discover new insights and make predictions. [...]
Predigy is a technology originally developed by Intelligent Results (founded in 2001) that was acquired by First Data in 2007. It was originally focused on the military (particularly on the analysis of unstructured data) but has subsequently moved into commercial applications. Predigy is now a decisioning platform with some applications in banking, collections, telecommunications and [...]
David Griffith from CUNA Mutual Group talked about predictive analytics in a B2B environment. CUNA targets credit unions and cooperatives and their members with software and insurance products. CUNA Mutual needed to acquire new credit union accounts for direct insurance products – credit unions who sign up can offer a full range of insurance products [...]
Stuart Crawford from Fair Isaac’s R&D group presented on New Approaches to Creating, Simplifying and Visualizing Rules. While decision trees can be very clear, they can also become very complex. His group has been working on algorithms for simplifying decision trees. Because decision trees often have repeating sub-trees – pieces of the tree that are [...]
Eric Siegel, who is chairing the new Predictive Analytics World show, presented on predictive analytics and business rules. Predictive analytics, says Eric, is a business intelligence technology that products a predictive score for each customer or prospect … and explanations thereof. These scores come from predictive models that are developed across your historical data. This [...]
Jan presented on Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams: Towards High Definition Communication. Decision tables are ways to represent sets of rules and there are many ways to represent sets of rules including trees and graphs. Some ways of representing rules are clearer than others and some are better for validation of the rules. You [...]

