Predictive Analytics Is Red Hot so get reading!

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According to an article by Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri, predictive analytics is a red hot topic! There are many examples across a broad range of industries where predictive analytics is driving better decisions:
  • President Obama's campaign team used sophisticated uplift modeling to target and influence swing voters.
  • Telecom firms that use predictive analytics to help prevent customer churn. 
  • Police departments that use it to reduce crime.
The list goes on and on and on. Let us quickly look at two of these uses cases because we have Oracle customers who have already implemented these types of solutions:
1) How telcos are using predictive analytics to reduce churn
a) Telecom Italia Lab - Churn is a critical problem in the telecommunications industry because losing customers is a drain on resources. Finding new customers to replace the ones that have defected to a competitor is an expensive process. Consequently companies go to great lengths to reduce the churn of their customer base because it saves them money.  We have a number of case studies in this area and the best one for demonstrating just how natural it is for Oracle Data Mining to analyze a data warehouse star schema has been documented in a whitepaper and a number of related blog posts. These articles explain the business problem and provide an overview of this particular churn model was developed:
  • Oracle Data Mining 11g Release 2 Mining Star Schemas A Telco Churn Case Study whitepaper, click here
  • Blog posts on the Data Mining blog are here 
To help telco companies speed up the process of creating and deploying predictive analytics we have incorporated this type of advanced analytics directly into our Oracle Communications Data Model by delivering pre-built and automated churn and sentiment analysis. There is an excellent blog post that on this topic on the Oracle Data Mining blog, see here.
b) Turkcell - The presentation linked below provides an overview of how Turkcell, the leading GSM operator in Turke, developed a churn prediction model using Oracle Advanced Analytics. The presentation from OpenWorld 2010 starts with an overview of the churn prediction problem and the existing data mining system in Turkcell so that the participants have some knowledge about the churn problem and the existing solution to this problem. It the looks at the advantages of in-database data mining and Oracle Data Mining followed by a review of the prepaid churn model which was created by using Oracle Data Mining. The last section covers the results and the overall performance. The presentation (PPT file) can be download via this link: http://ndenizh.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/prepaid_churn_model.pptx or you can view the presentation via Google Quick View.
2) Crime fighting with Oracle Spatial and Oracle Advanced Analytics
Italian Government fights crime with technology using a new Business and Location Intelligence system—The Department of Public Security of the Ministry of the Interior to combat crime through the SIGR (Integrated System for the Georeferencing of Crimes) platform, developed by Iconsulting using Oracle Business Intelligence and Geospatial technology.
  • Press release: Italian Government fights crime with technology using a new Business and Location Intelligence system, click here.
  • Presentation: Location Intelligence and Spatial What-If Analysis - Government: A New Way of Fighting Petty Crime, click here.

 How to get started with predictive analytics
While many Oracle customers are already working with predictive analytics according to Forrester it appears that many businesses do not really understand the what, why, and how of predictive analytics. If you want to understand more about predictive analytics and what it can do for your business then Mike has produced a recommended reading list to help get you started on your journey to deep insight. The list is available here: http://blogs.forrester.com/mike_gualtieri/13-03-20-intro_to_predictive_analytics_reading_list.

 Where to get more information about Oracle's in-database predictive analytics
For more information about how our customers are already using Advanced Analytics please follow this link to "Oracle Data Mining Customer Successes" page on OTN.
For more information about Oracle's Advanced Analytics (Data Mining and R Enterprise) visit the home page on OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced-analytics/index.html
For more information about Oracle Spatial visit the home page on OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database-options/spatialandgraph/overview/spatialfeatures-1902020.html
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