Andrew Flint

We’re back, with a new edition of our series on choosing the right analytics for the job.  Today’s situation: data is in ample supply, but too much of it feels beyond the reach of traditional analytic algorithms.  By volume, 80 percent of the data out there is untapped and much of it is unstructured – too messy and just too complex to crack open. Reg…

"A bounty hunting scam joins two men in an uneasy alliance against a third in a race to find a fortune in gold buried in a remote cemetery,” reads the plot summary of 1966's quintessential spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The state of Big Data Analytics can feel like a different kind of spaghetti western, this one titled The Big, the Raw and the C…

Our radar picked up some interesting findings from IDC on the global business analytics market. After an impressive 14% growth in 2011, IDC forecasts continued growth at nearly 10% through 2016. The use of business analytics is becoming more mainstream, thanks in no small part to Big Data. As more companies learn that analytics can unlock the potential within the data…

We recently gave James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions a tour of our latest release of Xpress, where we showed off the new visualization capabilities of Insight. James posted a “First Look – FICO Xpress Optimization 7.3” today on his blog and noted: This kind of environment is important in optimization because the result of a model is often not readily…

As an analytic scientist, I know how exciting it can be to unearth a novel, actionable insight with the potential to improve the business. And I also know how challenging it can be to persuade business leaders to recognize the value, to the point where they are comfortable adopting such changes in their decision strategies. Naturally, any line of business owner…

Unless you’ve been off the grid for most of the year, you know that solvency and credit risk are dominating concerns for European banks and governments these days. Predictive models have long been vital tools for driving safe, effective lending decisions at the retail and commercial level, but recently the demand for greater transparency around these models has sharpl…

The news is filled with stories about how companies are beginning to harness the masses of data swirling around us, thanks to the advent of social media and a wealth of other transactional data. The key challenge is to sift through the immense streams of information and arrive at something useful. In a recent article (“Banks harnessing big data to analyse custo…

Everyone is looking for new techniques that will help them leverage Big Data. One of FICO’s scientists, Xing Zhao, recently married a popular collaborative filtering algorithm, matrix factorization, with our powerful segmented ensemble models, in FICO Model Builder. The result was strong enough to earn him a top 5 finish in the 2012 Knowledge Discovery and Data…