In today’s data-driven business landscape, the amount of data enterprises generate and collect is growing at unprecedented speed. Everyone agrees that data can deliver the edge that a business needs in order to be successful. However, the requirement to be data-driven has pushed many businesses to frantically acquire as much data as possible without paying …
Blog
Our blog section is like our Snopy (our company puppy) - everyone at Thing Solver love him and take care good of him.
Said that, here you can find posts form business, data and engineering experts that can be either from "solvers" kitchen or from various well known experts.
Personalized marketing as a strategy
Retail organizations worldwide are increasingly seeking to understand how AI is transforming the industry and one thing is for sure – in order to stay competitive in today’s market, retail businesses must carefully focus on consumers, prioritizing profit and (labor) productivity. This is exactly where Artificial intelligence (AI) can play a crucial role in supporting …
What is AI in eCommerce and How Does it Work?
Hello! Here you are, reading this article, and it is highly likely that some AI powered algorithm made it readily available for you based on your search and other information it might have on you. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it’s closely connected sub-term machine learning (ML) still for most people evoke some robot like perception, …
How Does AI Improve Customer Loyalty Through Personalization
In today’s highly competitive business environment, companies must do everything in their power to build and maintain customer loyalty. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through personalization, which leverages customer data and technology to deliver unique, tailored experiences to each individual customer. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a key tool …
Tailor-Made for Success: From starter-packs to AI-powered Personalization
In the emerging business need to stay competitive, increase conversion rates, boost loyalty programs and/or improve customer experience during shopping – recommenders have become an integral part of data-driven strategies. Depending on the end goal, available data and technical resources – there are different types of recommender models that can be of use. The final …
Personalization Made Easy: A How-To Approach with Customer, Transaction, and Product Data
Personalization is a critical aspect of any successful retail or e-commerce strategy. By tailoring your messages, offers, and product recommendations to each customer’s unique interests and preferences, you can create a more engaging and meaningful experience that drives loyalty and increases sales. However, personalization is only effective if you have the right data. In this …
Designing a smarter search box for a website
Research by renowned analysts is also clear – as many as 43% of web shop visitors first go to “search”, and as many as 39% of all online customers admit that “search” significantly influenced their purchase. Even if your website is organized perfectly, customers will still get confused and some simply prefer search mechanics. Yet, …
Our strategy for building products
When we started building our product, we focused on the Recommender engine and Segmentation. As a startup, we embraced agility and focus on the market. At the beginning of 2020, we decided that our product must become a reflection of our team. Then we said it must be a “no bullshit” product, agile or, in …
How to combine Visual Search and IM
In this text we will try to briefly explain IM applications integration with Visual Search. You can read more about Visual Search implementation in our last blog post. Instant Messaging (IM) and Chatbots Among all other benefits, The Internet has transformed and simplified how people communicate with each other. In addition to email, IM has …
Light reading for nerds: How to build a Visual Search application
Understand and Engage your customer(s) with more AI power
Time to Reflect: Our Culture From a Maternity Leave Perspective
Bonuses and monetary incentives are touted as a cure-all solution for instilling a culture in a company. Fortunately, it will take a touch more than financial incentives to get the culture right. Giving monetary incentives can lead to poor results; look no further than what happened to the Brits in colonial India. The British governor …
How banks can leverage AI: Segmentation as one-two-three!
Segmentation is a widely known term, especially within the marketing sector. It is an insightful, effective and actionable approach to better understanding a customer or client base. What is so attractive about leveraging AI specifically within the banking sector is the amount and variety of data. Segmentation per se is not the final outcome of …
A closer view on Data Science Delivery
According to Gartner, only 15% to 20% of data science projects get completed. Of those projects that did complete, CEOs say that only about 8% of them generate value. Despite these facts, data science is still considered as an opportunity for business growth. These facts are something that always lingers in the back of everyone’s …
Be one step ahead: Solver AI Suite short overview
Intro and motivation In the beginning, it started as the three separate projects. The first one for managing machine learning models known as MoMa, the second one for forecasting using multiple models to give the best results (Fibi), and the third one was a business solution for segmentation and recommender system with personalized view and …
How to perform Time Series Clustering using ML
Time series is a term that you must or would have faced in your Data Science career. If you are completely new to this, don’t worry, it is really intuitive. What is actually a Time Series? It is a collection of data points collected at constant time intervals. So, we have a history data about …
How we improved efficiency by establishing a development process
In the field of software development, different teams have different approaches to how things are being done. When the team is small, introducing processes may be overwhelming, and the biggest challenge is to determine when is the right time to define one. From the early days at Things Solver, we didn’t quite think about defining …
How we deliver value at Things Solver – Focus on the goal
I didn’t want to start this post by quoting the percentage of data science projects failing to deliver commercial value or business utilization. Many data science projects fail – and that’s a fact. What’s important is to make sure that you are not spending hundreds of Ks of euros/dollars? and other resources and fail. Being …
AI for eCommerce: How to use Visual Search
Lately we’ve been hearing different kinds of buzzwords all the time – ‘deep learning’, ‘neural networks’, ‘computer vision’, ‘artificial intelligence’… But the explanation of each one of them is actually not so simple. Still, it’s not hard to understand the main concepts of them in order to use it in some real-world applications. One of …
Things Solver has joined forces with Asseco SEE Group
This confirms Things Solver’s strategy to continuously enhance its solutions and offer the most advanced products and services to customers Joining forces with the established IT partner ASEE, together we will accelerate the development of existing and new products based on advanced analytics and data processing. We are happy to embark on this new journey, …
Introduction to recommender systems
After watching Udemy online course Building Recommender Systems with Machine Learning and AI, I came up with the idea to write a text that can help beginners to understand the basic ideas of the recommender systems. A recommender system, or a recommendation system is a subclass of information filtering system that seeks to predict the …
Streaming analytics in banking: How to start with Apache Flink and Kafka in 7 steps
In the previous text, we talked about the basics of streaming, what it means in theory, what are the advantages, disadvantages and mentioned some streaming tools. This text is more technical, and we will talk about Flink in general as well as the basics of streaming in Flink, the whole process from start (read data) …
How to model better recommendations in Covid time?
Needs in the IT sector are constantly changing. After Coronavirus hit us unexpectedly, this is true, more than ever. In order to keep distance from each other, we were forced to limit all our activities that can’t be done online. At first, this was shocking and we weren’t prepared for such change. But when we …
Once you start with streaming, you go with the flow!
Data streaming has become very popular in the big data industry. It is used for processing large amounts of data from different sources which are continuously generated, in real-time. When we say “real-time” we need to understand that it can vary from a few milliseconds to a few minutes. Besides that streaming is enabling us …
Friday talks: EDA done right
Main challenges Although EDA is often observed as an initial step which should be straightforward, there are some challenges that could slow down and make this process poor and painful. Some of the challenges I have encountered so far are listed below. Poorly defined business problem (and not having the understanding of it). Not having …
FRIDAY TALKS: DATA SCIENCE IN MARKETING #ESSENTIALS
Marketing is one of the most fertile fields for Data Science. There are many different techniques and directions which marketing teams are striving to realize, but the two most frequently discussed are – up sell and cross sell. For those of you who are less familiar with the terms, “up sell” stands for the action …
FRIDAY TALKS: PROCESS MINING – WHERE PROCESS SCIENCE MEETS DATA SCIENCE
We live in the era of information technology, when we generate more data in 10 minutes than the amount of total data generated from prehistoric times by the year of 2003. Having the processing power and memory resources to handle all this data being generated from different actors within different processes – organizations strive to …
HOW TO START WITH DATA SCIENCE?
After participating in a meetup at the end of March, subjected “Data Science – what is it?”, a lot of people contacted me to send them some introductory materials to help them get started with learning. It took me a long time to sit down and start compiling a list, because there are many sources, …
Dash by Plotly
Let’s say you have been working on a project for clients segmentation. You have your client segments well separated and your final task is to present findings and results to the project stakeholders. Usual situation is that none of them have that level of technical expertise to understand your code so you need to visualize …
FRIDAY TALKS: FRIENDS OR FOES? Propensity to purchase vs. Survival analysis
Retail industry. In the glory of Data Science, it’s all about the data and tailor-made targeting. If you want to brag about it, you would say – I’ve got the unique, omni-channel, 360-something, that can perfectly model customer’s behaviour and even go to Mars. What really happens is that you literally feel lost. There are …
FRIDAY TALKS: WOMEN IN DATA SCIENCE
Hello, fellas. Cool down, I’m not going to talk about extreme feminism and gender (in)equality. 🙂 This post is going to be about extraordinary women I had a chance to meet at the Women in Data Science conference, held in Subotica, this April. I truly believe that these girls deserve to be heard of, as …
Friday talks: The Holy Grail of Machine Learning
Pedro Domingos is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. He is a winner of the SIGKDD Innovation Award, which FYI is the highest honor in Data Science. They say that approximately seven years is the time period needed to become an expert in the field of Data Science. This …
Hello Docker
Having spent couple of weeks on data preparation and developing that particular machine learning model, you are finally ready to show off with some really good results to your boss. You have your notebooks with lines of code doing magic, maybe some reports in Excel, amazing visualizations in Plotly etc. It’s 5 minutes till your presentation …
INTUITION vs. DATA
Our company – Things Solver, helps clients make better decisions by analyzing relevant data. During analysis of the data, we often notice significant differences between what our clients would intuitively decide and what their data tells them to do. One striking example of a gap between our perception and reality is the state of the …
Friday talks: A Data Science Project
Friday talks: The dark horse of Isolation Forest
When dealing with anomalies in the data, there are lots of challenges that should be solved. We’ve already had a couple of articles regarding this topic, and if you haven’t already read it, I suggest you to take a look at this one, aaand this one, from my fellow colleague Miloš. In this post, I’m …
How the Big Data Won the Hearts in Telecommunications
The fact that there is a deep connection between the telecommunications and Big Data is very clear – the main task for telecommunications is in exchanging data. Since the amount of data has enormously increased in the modern era, the experts in telecommunication companies needed some help from the specialised experts. The need for the …
Time series Anomaly Detection using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)
Why time series anomaly detection? Let’s say you are tracking a large number of business-related or technical KPIs (that may have seasonality and noise). It is in your interest to automatically isolate a time window for a single KPI whose behavior deviates from normal behavior (contextual anomaly – for the definition refer to this …
Recommender Systems and Banks: Precious Recommendation
The client’s path, from conceiving an idea to making it a project in the bank, used to be clear, but unpredictable. It involved a potentially noticed ad or the client’s own idea, a visit to the bank counter in person and the more or less successful deal with the bank. It was very time consuming, …
Data Science Academy Finals: „New Knowledge Is Always Welcome”
Students of the first Data Science Academy spent three months on a journey through the world of data science, big data and analytics. Although most of them are coming from the world where Data Science is not the hottest thing, they bring home many impressions from the journey. “The knowledge is never a burden, new …
Data Exploration with Pandas (Part 2)
In the previous article, I wrote about some introductory stuff and basic Pandas capabilities. In this part, the main focus will be on DateTime values. I am also going to introduce you to some grouping and merging possibilities in Pandas. For this purpose here is another dataset downloaded from UCI Repository, which contains date and time …
Big Data and Banking: How Our Data Protects Us
Some of the main tasks for the bankers are, among others, keeping, preserving, deriving more from less, taking the best out of what the clients deposit to them, with great confidence and trust. Almost the same definition could be applied to the Data Scientists dealing with the big data. They also deal with keeping, preserving, …
Why the Telco Industry seems destined for Big Data
A man is defined in numerous scientific ways, but one definition seems unchanged since the beginning of time. The man is the creature that communicates – from the first attempt to speak, till the last tale told to grandchildren. “The telecommunications are defined as the exchange of the information between the source and the destination, …
Success Formula: Science, Business and Programming
In every business, the ultimate dream is the one about the magic success formula. The search for ingredients is very extensive, but they often live next door. So now the greater „magic” becomes the question of using, understanding and connecting those dots. That „magic” even has a name. „Data Science is actually the applied science …
Anomaly detection
The problem of anomaly detection is a very challenging problem often faced in data analysis. Whether it is about clustering, classification or some other machine learning problem, it is of great importance to identify anomalies and handle them in some way, in order to achieve optimal model performances. Furthermore, anomalies could often influence the analysis …
Data Exploration with Pandas (part 1)
If you ever decide to become someone who is into big data, surely you can do it without having a clue about pandas. But that’s not the brightest solution, because why would you leave aside something that’s gonna make you a lot better. Pandas as well know library for manipulating datasets that contains numerical and …
Handling missing data
Hi, everyone. Although I planned for my next post to be about anomaly detection and their treatment, I faced some other type of problem that quickly escalated into huge issue affecting the modelling and results accuracy, and couldn’t resist to share my experience as soon as possible. In this post, I will be talking about …
Forecasting with VAR and Prophet
In my previous post, I tried to present the ARIMA model for forecasting. It was based on the use of autoregression and moving average concepts, combining the regression of variable based on its lagged values and calculation of error based on the linear combination of error terms occurred in the past, respectively. In this post, …
Interactive log analysis with Apache Spark
The Internet is becoming the largest global shop across markets, and anyone who is offering products and services of any kind prefers for web shops to become the primary outlets to supply customers. This leads to a reduction in the number of employees and traditional brick and mortar branches and reduction in costs, so it …
Forecasting with ARIMA
One of the most challenging machine learning problems is predicting some output based on the history of its previous values. The complexity of the problem multiplies as new features and constraints are added to analysis. Thus, in time series analysis it is not always enough to use previous values only, there often are many features …