BigData Success Stories
Every company, in particular large large enterprises, faces both
great opportunities and challenges with respect to extracting value
from the data available to them. In each of the following notable
examples, organizations have used data science to craft solutions to
pressing problems, a process which in turn opens up more opportunities
and challenges.
One of the best-known examples of data science, due to a
best-selling book and recent film, is the collective movement in
baseball toward intensive statistical analysis of player performance to
complement traditional appraisals. Led by the works of baseball
analyst Bill James, and ultimately by management decisions of Oakland
Athletics' manager Billy Beane, teams discovered that some players were
undervalued by traditional metrics. Since Boston hired James in 2003,
the Red Sox have won two World Series, following more than 80 years
without a title.
Among sports, baseball presented an especially rich opportunity for analysis, given access to meticulous records for many games dating back to over one hundred years ago. Today other sports organizations, such as the NBA, have begun to apply some of the same techniques.
In the 2012 presidential election, both campaigns supported
get-out-the-vote activities with intricate polling, data mining, and
statistical analysis. In the Obama campaign, this analytics effort was
code-named Narwhal, while the Romney campaign dubbed theirs Orca. The
aim of these systems, described by Atlantic Monthly and other sources,
was to identify voters inclined to vote for the candidate, convince the
individual to vote for the candidate of the party in question, and
direct resources to ensure the individual reached the polling place on
Election Day. Reportedly, Narwhal had a capacity of 175 million names
and employed more than 120 data scientists. Orca was comparatively
small, with a capacity of 23 million names.
Ultimately, Narwhal is credited with having delivered for the Obama campaign "ground game" in battleground states, turning a seemingly close election into a comfortable victory and validating many polls that had predicted a small but consistent advantage for the incumbent.
In 2010, the social networking company sought to determine whether the proposed "like" button would catch on with users and how this link to other websites could drive traffic to the site. The company offered the feature to a small sample of users and collected detailed web logs for those users. This data was processed into structured form (using Hadoop and Hive). Analytics showed that overall content generation increased, even content unrelated to the "like" button.
Aside from the impact of the feature on the Facebook website itself, this feature provides the company with a wealth of information about user behavior across the Internet which can be used to predict reactions to new features and determine the impact of online advertising.
In early 2012, the New York Times described a concerted effort by
consumer goods giant Target to use purchase records, including both the
identity of the purchased items and the temporal distribution of those
purchases - to classify customers, particularly pregnant women.
Predicting when women were in the early stages of a pregnancy presented
the opportunity to gain almost exclusive consumer loyalty for a period
when families might want to save time by shopping at a single
location. Once individuals were identified by the company's data
science team, Target mailed coupons for products often purchased by
pregnant women. In one incident, a man called the company to complain
that his daughter had received mailings filled with such coupons, and
it was unacceptable that the company was encouraging her to become
pregnant. Days later, the man called to apologize: Target had, in fact,
correctly surmised that his daughter was pregnant.
For online businesses, making good recommendations to customers is a
classic data science challenge. As described by Wired, online retailer
Overstock.com used to spend $2 million annually on software to drive
recommendations for additional purchases. Last year, Overstock.com's
R&D team used machine learning algorithms from Mahout, an open
source Hadoop project, to develop a news article recommendation app
based on articles that the user had read.
The success of this app inspired the company to use Mahout to replace the recommendation service for products on its own main website. By turning to an open source solution for data science, the company is saving millions of dollars. In addition to Overstock.com, other players in online retail are now taking a close look at Mahout and other Hadoop technologies.
An abundance of publicly available data online has stoked further
interest in "democratizing" access to information that would help the
average citizen understand certain markets. Wired talked to Fred
Trotter about his successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request
to obtain records on doctor referrals, which could provide insights
into the healthcare system. The resulting data set, which he called the
Doctor Social Graph, has already been turned into a tool for patients.
Trotter hopes to combine this data set with others from healthcare
organizations to develop a tool for rating doctors.
A travel app startup called JetPac knew they had a problem. They needed to figure out better ways to automatically identify the best pictures among thousands taken by their users, based on metadata such as captions, dimensions, and location. In fall 2011, the company partnered with another start up, Kaggle, to set up a competition among data scientists all over the world to develop an algorithm. The ideal algorithm would allow a machine to come to the same conclusion as a human about the quality of a picture, and the top prize was $5,000.
Building on the highest-ranked algorithm from the competition, JetPac successfully introduced the new functionality into their product. According to Wired, the company subsequently received $2.4 million in venture capital funding. With a little help from the data science community, JetPac is well on its way to building its business.
For almost five years, the DC-based startup Opower has built a business on providing power consumers recommendations on how to reduce their bills. The company's system collects data from 75 utilities on more than 50 million homes, then sends recommendations through email and other means.
Although other companies offer similar services, Opower has been able to scale up significantly using Hadoop to store large amounts of data from power meters across the country. The more data the company can analyze, the greater the opportunity for good recommendations, and the more energy there is to be saved. Success has enabled Opower to develop new offerings in partnership with established companies such as Facebook.
Health insurance giant Aetna was not achieving the desired level of success in addressing symptoms of metabolic syndrome, which is associated with heart disease and strokes. In summer 2012, the company had created an in-house data science team, and the group went to work on the issue. In partnership with an outside lab focused on metabolic syndrome, Aetna used their data on more than 18 million customers to design personalized recommendations for patients suffering from related symptoms.
Aetna intends to harvest additional data available for this kind of analysis by incorporating natural language processing to read notes handwritten by doctors. Ultimately, the company plans to use data science to bring down costs and improve outcomes for cancer patients.
Every company wants to know the right time to reach out to customers, making sure the message has the maximum impact and avoiding a perception of saturation. A company called Globys is helping large telecommunications corporations understand when to make the pitch. In particular, Globys analyzed data on users of pre-paid phone services, who are not locked into a longer contract. These users face a decision on a regular basis of whether to stay with a particular company or make a change. Globys was able to identify the right time in the user's "recharge cycle" for the company to reach out. With these recommendations, companies have seen revenue from pre-paid services increase up to 50 percent.
"Moneyball"
Among sports, baseball presented an especially rich opportunity for analysis, given access to meticulous records for many games dating back to over one hundred years ago. Today other sports organizations, such as the NBA, have begun to apply some of the same techniques.
- BaseballProspectus.com: A Statistician Rereads Bill James
- ESPN.com: John Hollinger reflects on the about-face of professional baseball's stance toward analytics
- ESPN.com: Rick Carlisle, the Dallas Mavericks, and number-crunching
Get Out the Vote 2012
Ultimately, Narwhal is credited with having delivered for the Obama campaign "ground game" in battleground states, turning a seemingly close election into a comfortable victory and validating many polls that had predicted a small but consistent advantage for the incumbent.
Additional Links
- TheAtlantic.com: When the Nerds Go Marching In
- Narwhal vs. Orca: A breakdown
The "Like" Button
In 2010, the social networking company sought to determine whether the proposed "like" button would catch on with users and how this link to other websites could drive traffic to the site. The company offered the feature to a small sample of users and collected detailed web logs for those users. This data was processed into structured form (using Hadoop and Hive). Analytics showed that overall content generation increased, even content unrelated to the "like" button.
Aside from the impact of the feature on the Facebook website itself, this feature provides the company with a wealth of information about user behavior across the Internet which can be used to predict reactions to new features and determine the impact of online advertising.
Additional Links
Pregnancy Prediction
Additional Links
- Forbes.com: How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did
- NYTimes.com: How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Open-Source Recommendation Algorithms
The success of this app inspired the company to use Mahout to replace the recommendation service for products on its own main website. By turning to an open source solution for data science, the company is saving millions of dollars. In addition to Overstock.com, other players in online retail are now taking a close look at Mahout and other Hadoop technologies.
Additional Links
Transparency in Healthcare
Additional Links
- Wired.com: Bringing Hidden Healthcare Data Into the Open
- Fred Trotter: Tracking the Social Doctor: Opening Up Physician Referral Data (And Much More)
Photo Quality Prediction
A travel app startup called JetPac knew they had a problem. They needed to figure out better ways to automatically identify the best pictures among thousands taken by their users, based on metadata such as captions, dimensions, and location. In fall 2011, the company partnered with another start up, Kaggle, to set up a competition among data scientists all over the world to develop an algorithm. The ideal algorithm would allow a machine to come to the same conclusion as a human about the quality of a picture, and the top prize was $5,000.
Building on the highest-ranked algorithm from the competition, JetPac successfully introduced the new functionality into their product. According to Wired, the company subsequently received $2.4 million in venture capital funding. With a little help from the data science community, JetPac is well on its way to building its business.
Additional Links
- Wired.com: How One Startup Turned a $5,000 Contest Into Millions
- Kaggle.com:Photo Quality Prediction competition
Energy Efficiency
For almost five years, the DC-based startup Opower has built a business on providing power consumers recommendations on how to reduce their bills. The company's system collects data from 75 utilities on more than 50 million homes, then sends recommendations through email and other means.
Although other companies offer similar services, Opower has been able to scale up significantly using Hadoop to store large amounts of data from power meters across the country. The more data the company can analyze, the greater the opportunity for good recommendations, and the more energy there is to be saved. Success has enabled Opower to develop new offerings in partnership with established companies such as Facebook.
Additional Links
- GigaOm.com: OPower - The Big Data Energy Player to Beat
Improving Patient Outcomes
Health insurance giant Aetna was not achieving the desired level of success in addressing symptoms of metabolic syndrome, which is associated with heart disease and strokes. In summer 2012, the company had created an in-house data science team, and the group went to work on the issue. In partnership with an outside lab focused on metabolic syndrome, Aetna used their data on more than 18 million customers to design personalized recommendations for patients suffering from related symptoms.
Aetna intends to harvest additional data available for this kind of analysis by incorporating natural language processing to read notes handwritten by doctors. Ultimately, the company plans to use data science to bring down costs and improve outcomes for cancer patients.
Additional Links
Pre-Paid Phone Service
Every company wants to know the right time to reach out to customers, making sure the message has the maximum impact and avoiding a perception of saturation. A company called Globys is helping large telecommunications corporations understand when to make the pitch. In particular, Globys analyzed data on users of pre-paid phone services, who are not locked into a longer contract. These users face a decision on a regular basis of whether to stay with a particular company or make a change. Globys was able to identify the right time in the user's "recharge cycle" for the company to reach out. With these recommendations, companies have seen revenue from pre-paid services increase up to 50 percent.
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