‘Paradigm’ shift in data analysis promises change
aging to build models that scored over 0.8 in the AUC test, a well-recognized model evaluation metric. Usually, models with 0.8 are good enough for industrial application.
“But that is not good enough because 30 percent of them failed. There is still a long way to go,” Dai added.
Currently, the company has over 100 employees and Yang Qiang, the only Chinese councilor at the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, is its principal scientist.
Zhao Ziming, an analyst at Beijing-based internet consultancy Analysys, said the ability to analyze data becomes increasingly important as companies realize that within the voluminous quantity of data lie insights that could give them a competitive edge.
“Without AI-enabled data science, there would be no personalized shopping recommendations on websites like eBay and Amazon and tailored content and advertising on Facebook,” he added. “But it is pretty difficult for companies to cash in onto such demand.”
In a KPMG survey of senior executives, 99 percent said that analysis of big data was important to their strategy for next year.
Data scientists have become highly sought-after in the marketplace, but there are still relatively few of them. That’s exactly where 4Paradigm tries to offer a solution.
In November, it teamed up with China Everbright Bank to set up an AI research lab. It has been offering data analysis to improve precision marketing for the bank’s credit card business.
“Compared with rivals, we have the wide-reaching data mining program that enables enterprises to capture what typical users do on the internet.” Dai said.
“AI is no longer just capable of profiling groups. We are trying to picture each consumer as precisely as possible.”
While other targeted marketing service providers divide 50 million customers into 10 or so categories, the company said it can group them into 500 billion categories based on millions of dimensions.
“Empowered by machine learning, Prophet lowered the demand for computing power and accelerated the analysis process,” Dai said, adding that its client’s sales performance went up by 60 percent after using the company’s service.