math

A new white paper outlines the journey to optimal decisions and the role of mathematical optimization in getting the business results you want.

We’ve blogged recently about some of the challenges in analytics and AI – How More Companies Can Maximize the Potential of Analytics and 80% of insurance carriers aren’t delivering high impact analytics – building on some great McKinsey research. They recently published another article, this time targeted at Chief Analytics Officers – Rebooting analytics leadership: Time to move beyond the [...]

I am joining Eric Kavanagh of the Bloor Group to discuss Easy as Pi – Why Mathematicians Rock Data Science Thursday November 16 at 3pm Eastern. Do the math! Using analytics to drive business value often boils down to a formula of some kind. That’s why mathematicians are in such high demand these days. Whether for [...]

I am participating in a webinar on “The citizen data scientist: Can you democratize analytics for better business outcomes?” with Information Management, sponsored by Dell. Analytics is about better understanding customers, markets, and other phenomena that impact business performance. So while PhDs in mathematics and computer science play an important role in analytics success, employees with [...]

An additional blog post here on a session at Building Business Capability that I missed – Business Analysis for Data Science teams. I know Susan Meyer who presented it and we talked several times about her presentation. It’s a really key topic so I wanted to present a summary. Here goes: There is a lot [...]

The third post in my series on standards in Predictive Analytics is on R, a hot topic in analytic circles these days. R is fundamentally an interpreted language for statistical computing and for the graphical display of results associated with these statistics. Highly extensible, it is available as free and open source software. The core environment [...]

Neil focused his session on Analytics. Analytics, he says, has roared to the front office in recent years (driven in part by the explosion of data and data management technology). Big, as in Big Data, is relative. The rate of increase has not particularly changed in recent years but the rate of increase is being [...]

I got a chance to catch up with Via Science recently [Post updated June 2014 to reflect some changes in terminology]. Via Science is focused on “Big Math” for “big data.” They see big data companies spanning from data collection to search/storage to analysis/visualization. Big Math – the category in which they like to put [...]

Mychelle Mollot kicked off day 2 of the Analyst Insights event discussing the analytic skills gap. Only 1 in 10 organizations, she says, feel they have the tech skills they need while 3 in 4 students feel they lack the skills they need. Meanwhile 72% of academic institutions believe they generate employable graduates but only [...]

IBM has a portfolio of decision optimization products that are integral to their smarter analytics strategy, aimed at both the hard-core optimization experts as well as targeting line of business markets. IBM sees optimization expanding, expanding from the traditional optimization technology market to a more mainstream decision optimization platform with an increasing focus on specific [...]

Paul Kent, VP of Big Data, came up next and gave a white board talk with no slides. His initial focus was on parallel processing for analytics, something that SAS has been working on for a while and that is key to their HPA and Big Data approaches. He points out that some problems (min [...]

FICO Xpress Optimization Suite is part of the FICO Decision Management tools suite. It can be used in conjunction with various FICO applications too. It is used directly with their Marketing product and is embedded in their Decision Optimizer product that can generate optimal rules for their Originations, Customer Management, Collections and Fraud products. Outside [...]

Fuzzy Logix is an advanced analytics software solution and services company headquartered in Charlotte North Carolina, with offices in Cupertino California, Richmond, Virginia and distribution channels throughout the world. Fuzzy Logix provides an in-database analytics solution, supporting both in-database model construction and in-database scoring.  They also offer in-GPU solutions, which allow users to access potentially [...]

StatSoft was founded in 1984 and started building statistical software when it first became practical to deliver on the PC. STATISTICA is an enterprise predictive analytics platform on the Windows platform with role-based access, connections to the various data sources that companies have and support for data exploration through to deployment. The product has four [...]

The other session I got to see at FICO World was a panel discussion on analytic modeling tools with representatives from UniCredit (Italy), Ferratum (Finland), Nedbank (South Africa), and Citi. Challenges and rewards of building an analytic modeling team Always start from scratch with fresh, inexperienced teams and this is both challenging and rewarding Challenges [...]

A reader of my company’s newsletter recently emailed me and asked me if I could highlight the difference in how one approaches building a predictive model when compared to more “traditional” descriptive models. And why the approaches are different. He went on to say that he had a colleague who insists that developing aggregate statistical [...]

I have been doing more thinking about optimization recently and thought I should get caught up with the OR (Operations Research) folks at SAS to see what they are doing. They see OR technologies as part of the overall analytics spectrum and feel that anything that improves the rigor of decision making without unduly constraining [...]

Tom Davenport kicked off the second day of Predictive Analytics World with a keynote on the new era of quantitative, or data-driven business. Various analytic threads – web analytics, HR analytics, actuarial, predictive marketing and supply chain – are coming together in really what is best described as Enterprise analytics. The world is changing and [...]

Gurobi is the latest entrant to the mainstream optimization engine market (IBM/ILOG CPLEX and FICO Dash being the two main players with CPLEX having by far the largest market share). Gurobi was founded by Zonghau Gu, Ed Rothberg and Bob Bixby in 2008. The three of them were instrumental in the development of  CPLEX, the [...]