Shafi Rahman

With all the hype around artificial intelligence, many of our customers are asking for some proof that AI can get them better results in areas where other kinds of analytics are already in use, such as credit risk assessment. With 25 years of experience with AI and machine learning under our belt, we can certainly provide that proof. My colleague Scott Zoldi blogged…

How can banks leverage their transactional and non-traditional data sources to fight attrition and risk prediction? At this week’s Credit Scoring and Credit Control XIV conference, I will be discussing this subject in detail, but I thought I’d give you an overview of my talk. Transactional and non-traditional data sources show a lot of promise for banks. Using transa…

Shafi Rahman In mid-March, David Lazer and his colleagues published a paper in Science that demonstrated that Google Flu Trends overestimated the number of cases of flu substantially. Google Flu Trends and other similar success stories have amplified the big hype around Big Data. After the publication, many more articles appeared taking potshots at Big Data. This is…

Shafi Rahman and Eeshan Malhotra Up until the recent past, analytic scientists had to resort to complex frameworks and data designs to solve their big data problems. This was necessitated due to lack of sufficiently abstracted frameworks. The advent of modern Big Data infrastructure (note capitalization) provides the necessary level of abstraction so that the analy…

By Shafi Rahman A common question in today’s world is whether one can create models automatically. As I noted in one of my earlier blogs, FICO pioneered the use of Big Data and machine automation frameworks for building thousands of highly predictive models extremely rapidly by leveraging terabytes of a variety of data sources. Naturally, some folks wonder whet…

By Shafi Rahman In my session at FICO World on Mechanisms for Building Multiple Models, we will be discussing the technique of modeling automation that FICO pioneered. We have a suite of predictive modeling functionalities and architectures, which are algorithm driven and can be easily automated. They can also be used to train models in a manual, expert driven manner…

By Shafi Rahman How do you boil the ocean in a day? One bucket at a time. The trick is to boil multiple buckets simultaneously to significantly speed up the boiling process. There is an important concept here for all practitioners of analytics - extracting information from huge volume of data is tractable if the solution is designed intelligently. In my previous bl…

By Shafi Rahman clair•voy•ance /kle(ə)rˈvoiəns/Noun: Ability to perceive matters beyond the range of ordinary perception- Merriam-Webster Dictionary When was the last time you wished you knew what was going on in someone’s mind or that you could foretell future? Over the centuries and across the cultures, the ability to mind read and predict the future has held…