New product automates data discovery and integration, accelerating time-to-production for advanced analytics
Explorium, the automated external data platform for advanced analytics and machine learning, today announced the launch of Signal Studio, a product that enables data and business analyst teams to quickly find and integrate the most relevant external data signals to their analytics pipelines. Signal Studio automates the data acquisition process, dramatically reducing discovery costs and ensuring businesses invest in datasets with optimal relevance, accuracy and compliance.
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The launch comes during a time when internal data is constantly made insufficient or obsolete by rapidly evolving business conditions. When events such as the COVID-19 pandemic trigger ongoing changes in business and buyer behavior, a company’s existing analytics and ML models are rendered useless. New regulations also impact how organizations can use data, resulting in signal loss. These tumultuous market conditions have inspired more businesses to leverage external data to make reliable predictions.
Seeking context, businesses often turn to external data (such as foot traffic, weather information and purchasing behavior) to launch new programs or strengthen their internal datasets to identify emerging trends. External data enhances analytics models to more accurately forecast demand, understand buyer behavior and detect fraud. A recent survey revealed that while 79% of organizations consider external data to be “very valuable,” more than 90% struggle to find relevant data and 77% report that they don’t know what to look for.
Securing the right external data is challenging for many reasons:
- Fragmented market: Data services, vendors and marketplaces all have their own acquisition policies. Negotiating access is a constant battle, especially when refreshing analytical models with real-time signals.
- Compatibility and integration: Differences in vendor formatting force business intelligence teams to spend significant time cleaning and harmonizing external data before they can integrate it into production pipelines.
- Acquisition costs: Scouring through hundreds of different datasets to find all possible signals — without any way to know their relevance and value until the models are in production — is both resource-intensive and very expensive.
Enter Signal Studio. Signal Studio pre-vets and harmonizes hundreds of curated premium and public external data sources across multiple categories, including company data, product data, person data, geospatial data and time-based data. The product automatically recommends the most relevant data signals based on the internal data provided, then matches and integrates the enriched data with a company’s internal datasets.
Signal Studio is fueled by continuously growing datasets that uncover more relevant signals over time, ensuring business analysts and marketing leaders can keep sharpening their insights. With Signal Studio, business analysts can now efficiently integrate the most relevant external data signals for their analytics pipelines, all while guaranteeing quality and accuracy.
Key benefits of Signal Studio include:
- Intelligent business decisions with instant access to the most relevant data signals: Signal Studio suggests signals, data points and features with the best coverage and provides a rich description for each. With a click, signals are added and matched to internal data.
- Better productivity via seamless pipeline integration: Automatically integrates the enriched data into production pipelines using custom output recipes, or standardizes the formatting for uploading to analytics, business intelligence and data visualization tools.
- Guaranteed compliance, quality and accuracy: Validates, vets and normalizes hundreds of external data sources and derives public data into thousands of proprietary signals.
For businesses like Behalf, which provides alternative lending and in-purchase financing solutions for small businesses and their B2B customers, adding external data to their models improves the ability to assess the risk level related to borrowers in dynamic business environments.
“Signal Studio enriches our existing data sources and helps us quickly assess their value in our models,” said Mirit Hirsh-Nuri, Senior Director of Credit and Fraud Risk at Behalf. “We chose Explorium for its unique combination of external data sources and a modeling platform all in one — not to mention the excellent support and expert advice from Explorium’s data science and product teams.”
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“Any enterprise leveraging analytics and data science will get a competitive edge by building scalable strategies to find, understand and leverage data outside of their organization,” said Omer Har, CTO of Explorium. “With the launch of Signal Studio, the Explorium platform automates the entire lifecycle of using external data for analytics: from discovery, acquisition, preparation and pipeline integration to internal data augmentation, model deployment and insight delivery.”