Rapid-I opens a new field of big data analysis through partnership with LifeStyle Marketing

With the LifeStyle Segmentation Extension, RapidMiner users can make accurate forecasts without a data size limit

Rapid-I, a leading provider of open source solutions for predictive analytics, data mining and text mining, and LifeStyle Marketing, a Russian consulting and processing firm specialised in customer acquisition and retention, are bringing out a solution for making profitability forecasts – the LifeStyle Marketing Extension. The extension integrated into RapidMiner enables an efficient evaluation of enormous quantities of weakly structured data without these having to be cleaned up beforehand.

The RapidMiner extension is based on a patented LifeStyle Segmentation algorithm, which determines the statistically most reliable and most relevant financial forecast models. Up to four billion variables arising out of historical raw data can be used, such as customer, article and transaction data. The extension was presented for the first time at the user and developer conference RCOMM 2012 (www.rcomm2012.com/).

"As one of the data mining platforms most frequently used in real projects, RapidMiner has a huge user community and extensive integration, analysis, and data manipulation possibilities – allowing quick and easy integration of our algorithm into projects and solutions", explains Maksim Drobyshev, CEO of LifeStyle Marketing. “Using incremental profitability as a goal, the algorithm relies on dependable approaches such as statistical hypothesis testing at conceptual level and hardware throughput optimisation at implementation level."

In a first application scenario, the LifeStyle targeting module serves for creating forecasting models in order to maximize the profit of offers or recommendations as a decision tree. Any information about past purchases (e.g. purchase amount, time or article) and about the buyer himself, which may be useful for evaluating the offer, is considered here. Some further cases of application are the monitoring of changes in customers’ purchasing behaviour, sales forecasts etc. The analysis, which considers current purchasing trends, can be quickly supplemented to include new factors as required.

"In the real world, most data is weakly structured, is often incorrect, sparse, and is scattered over many systems. Data analysts therefore have a lot of problems to deal with", explains Dr. Ingo Mierswa, managing director of Rapid-I. "In view of these challenges, enterprises must use a system that creates as meaningful forecast models as possible from the great number of possible hypotheses. A modelling involving millions of observations usually takes many hours; with the LifeStyle Marketing Extension it can be done within minutes on a conventional PC."

Information about LifeStyle Marketing
LifeStyle Marketing advises enterprises and provides processing of personalised programmes for customer acquisition, retention and development. The R&D department is based in Moscow. CEO Maksim Drobyshev has a degree in elementary particle research and has a wealth of experience in the area of retail banking, payment systems and consultation on customer behaviour with a large number of statistical applications.