Customer Story

Seer Analytics

Enriching Marketing Data to Predict Customer Behavior

Seer Analytics, LLC is a research company with a unique approach to compiling, understanding and presenting data. Integrating survey research, database analysis, geographic information systems and predictive modeling, Seer Analytics is in the business of “transforming data into market insight.” The company works with organizations that generate very large amounts of data, and enriches that data with various kinds of information. Often that means developing predictive models to understand customer behavior. For this, Seer Analytics has employed many different modeling products.

Challenge: Who Should I Take to Lunch?

One client is a non-profit organization with millions of records. The client needs to determine which members of the organization are most likely to make a large donation (in the client’s words, “Who should I take to lunch?”). Certain types of analyses are straightforward; for example, if a donor made a large donation in the past, he or she is statistically a good candidate to make a sizable gift in the future. However, many times it is not at all obvious and Seer Analytics needs to examine interactions between the various “features” (or variables) to find the best candidates. Some relationships are quite subtle, and the patterns in the data can be very difficult to tease out.

Solution: Models that Predict Behavior Using Non-linear Data

As the client’s donor data was non-linear and fairly “noisy”, Seer Analytics decided that using neural networks technology would provide the best results. NeuralWorks Predict from NeuralWare was the tool chosen to perform predictive modeling on the data.

According to CEO Bill Lazarus, “In our business, which consists of analyzing millions and millions of records for our clients everyday, we use a wide variety of modeling tools. When it comes to finding patterns in non-linear, often noisy, data, we have found NeuralWare unequaled in quality, ease of use, ease of deployment and responsive technical support. We especially appreciate the FlashCode component that converts the completed model into code. NeuralWorks Predict provides the most simple and straightforward code—requiring the least ‘tweaking’ of any product we have seen. This is a critical component. When working with millions of records, scoring files can be a delicate process. Move the data over by one position and the entire file is worthless.”

For this project, Seer Analytics made use of Predict’s genetic algorithms to help determine relevant features, and its automatic transformations to cleanse and normalize the data. Seer Analytics also appreciated Predict’s ability to automatically handle categorical data, as much of their client’s data was non-numerical.

Results: A 40 Percent Lift

As a result of the work of Seer Analytics, the client was able to show a 40 percent lift in the top four deciles in an actual validation, and was delighted with the results of the fundraising campaign. According to Mr. Lazarus, “These kinds of outcomes are not highly unusual. When you have reasonably good data and a strong modeling tool like NeuralWorks Predict, you really can produce excellent results.”