External Data

As published in CMSWire. Read the full article here. On June 8, 2020, The National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared the U.S was in a recession. The pandemic pushed companies to adjust their business models and the way they reached out to and interacted with customers. The lack of personal interaction presented many challenges. With […]

Finding the right vendor for alternative data is really hard. Each has their own processes and schema, down to the format the datasets are provided in and the mode of delivery. Even if you’re buying access to a single data source, you may struggle to differentiate between those offered by different data providers — and […]

As organizations move from data analytics to data science, their data needs evolve, too. Without data, there is no machine learning (ML). But we’re not talking about any old data; in fact, the kind of data you may have relied on for more straightforward analytics or BI just won’t cut it for machine learning, either.  […]

“External data sources are helping businesses personalize marketing offers, improve HR decisions, gain new revenue streams by launching new products or services, enhance risk visibility and mitigation, and better anticipate shifts in demand for their products and services.” Deloitte Insights, “Data Ecosystems: How Third-Party Information Can Enhance Data Analytics”, September 2019   Organizations across all […]

Here’s a question: does your organization have all the information it could ever need to succeed? I’ve yet to meet a business leader whose answer to that is “Yeah, we’re good — no more knowledge or insight required for us, thank you”. The more you know and understand about your business, your industry, your market, […]

I don’t think anyone was expecting 2020 to end up the way it did. In many ways, it’s safe to say that it’s been a very long time since we had such an eventful year, for better or worse. Even so, 2020 was not all bad. Even with the difficult times, technology offered people and […]

Leave it to Apple to suddenly drop a tidbit of news that shook an entire industry. The company announced that it would be releasing a numbered update to its mobile iOS software — iOS 14 — which would add some quality-of-life fixes, along with some new and possibly revolutionary features. However, despite a redesigned home […]

Money never sleeps, dataflows never slow, and a data leader’s job is never done. You aren’t just thinking about how to make sense of the data you already have, but also the data you need now, the data you may someday need — even the datasets that don’t yet exist, but that you’ll inevitably have […]

Many organizations see data acquisition and management as a business expense. You may hear questions like, what does it cost to collect and capture this data? What resources do we need to store it? Are analysis, modeling, and other data science projects a priority for us right now? Do we have the budget? It’s understandable […]

Congratulations! You’ve embraced machine learning and data science and your organization is well on its way to building a system that helps you deploy predictive analytics for greater insights. You’ve already done a lot of the heavy lifting, from finding the right platforms and tools to help you build your models to understanding the steps […]

As you know, every second of every day, we’re generating and acquiring new data. As you read this, someone is collecting data on the fact that you are reading it. Someone is collecting data on your device type, your browsing habits, where you fit within a larger pattern. They’re predicting your interests, values, maybe even […]

In times of crisis, organizations look for things to hold on to that give them a sense of certainty. After all, uncertain times mean tough going for business as usual, and also mean that you’re likely navigating in unknown waters. One of the first places an organization will turn to for answers is its data, […]

“Only a crisis —  actual or perceived — produces real change.” – Milton Friedman The start of 2020 has been one of the most turbulent on record for the global economy and for businesses everywhere. As fears over the spread of COVID-19 (also known as novel coronavirus) reach a fever pitch, national economies have stalled, […]

There are some insights that can only come from the data you produce or collect in-house. Historical sales figures, for example. Foot traffic through your store. Sign-ups and downloads of your app.  But no matter how complete that data, no matter how intelligent your prediction models, you don’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t collect […]

Data enrichment is a crucial step in the modeling process that data scientists tend to overlook due to the difficulty in finding and utilizing external sources. Before getting to engineer features, each modeler should ask themselves: “is that all the relevant data? Are there, maybe outside of the organization, additional sources that could generate impactful […]

If you’re familiar with Explorium then you know that we believe the core challenge for data science is data. Specifically, we believe data scientists need more of the right data to feed their models and make better predictions. This isn’t always the easiest task. The process of acquiring external data might look a little something […]