AI
On Decision Representation
There is not one but several representations of prescriptive decision logic. In this blog post, we describe the most used ones, from the simplest to the most sophisticated one.
Decision tables
Decision tables are a tabular representation of decisions. You can think of a decision table as a spreadsheet where rows are decisions and columns are the elements of decisions: inputs/outputs, conditions/conclusions, or conditions/actions.Decision tables are to be used when all the decisions (rows) have similar conditions (first columns) and similar actions (last columns). They should be used for stable decision logic where changes in the number of conditions are not frequent. Otherwise, they will pose the same difficulty as if the decision logic were mixed in with the code of the rest of the application.
Decision trees
A decision tree is a flowchart representation that graphically resembles an upside-down tree. The root of the tree is a decision that needs to be made. The inner nodes represent tests on attributes. The branches of the tree are further steps that need to be run, and the leaves of the tree are the decisions. Paths from root to a leaf represent a final decision.Decision trees are more powerful than decision tables because they allow decisions to have different numbers of conditions and actions. They are a better visual representation than decision tables when managing hierarchical decisions. Decision trees are to be used when the decisions share many conditions.
Decision graphs
Decision graphs are a generalization of decision trees where the flowchart is not from the root to the leaves. Links of the flowchart can go from one internal node to another at the same level or go up to a node at a higher level.Decision graphs are more sophisticated than decision trees. They are particularly useful for reflexive decisions, such as in dynamic questionnaires that can backtrack on a question based on information provided by respondents.
Lookup models
Lookup models are similar to VLookup in Excel. They transform a large data spreadsheet into a smaller indexed spreadsheet. Let’s say you import an auto insurance pricing spreadsheet with state, age, gender, score range, and rate columns. Given a value to each of these columns, the lookup model will retrieve the rate that matches these values.Lookup models are interesting when the tables are very large and really represent a lookup: determining a set of values from another set of values.
Business rules
With business rules, decisions take the form of “condition(s)-action(s)”. A rules engine iterates through the ruleset and triggers the rules with conditions that are true.Business rules provide a natural way to express decisions. They can express any imaginable decision logic and symbolic computation, making it the choice for highly sophisticated decisioning applications where the conditions as well as the actions can take a great variety of forms.
Which representation is the best?
No representation is better than the other. That’s why SMARTS supports them all.With SMARTS, you write your decisions in the form that suits you best. You can build a complete decision flow as a graphical diagram that reflects the actual flow of your transactions and mirrors the steps you get used to. You can display your decisions as a rule set, a decision table, trees, or a decision graph. And if necessary, you can switch from one representation to any other at any time.
About
Sparkling Logic is a Silicon Valley company dedicated to helping businesses automate and improve their operational decisions with a powerful decision management platform, accessible to business analysts and ‘citizen developers.’ Sparkling Logic’s customers include global leaders in financial services, insurance, healthcare, retail, utility, and IoT.Sparkling Logic SMARTSTM (SMARTS for short) is an all-in-one low-code platform for data-driven decision-making. It unifies decision authoring, testing, deployment, and maintenance. You can test it or ask for a demo.
Understandable Decisions with Vienna, the new version of SMARTS
This blog post presents the latest version of SMARTS, Vienna. Vienna expands SMARTS capabilities by strengthening the ease-of-use and clarity of implementing business decisions, allowing business analysts to more effectively manage complex, automated business decisions. The new version demonstrates continued innovation in the pursuit of Understandable Decisions, an integral part of Understandable AI.
Introduction
At Sparkling Logic, innovation never stops. Version after version, we push the boundaries of simplifying decision management technologies to make it even easier for business people to use them without heavy training in data analytics, machine learning, and business rules. The new version, Vienna, is no exception to the rule: it comes with a multitude of innovations that we group under the name of “understandable decisions.”
After Uhusia, here is Vienna
Since its creation, SMARTS has provided context to business analysts authoring their decision logic. They have been able to instantly see the impact of changes in their business strategies. With the Vienna version, Sparkling Logic has taken this approach to the next level, as their users can now better understand and explain to the team how the decisioning operates step by step. The dual objective is to ensure that the current logic complies with requirements, but also to foster conversation on ways to improve it over time.
To accelerate the implementation and understandability of decisions, Vienna comes with new enhancements and innovations for all the stakeholders.
For business analysts who build the decisioning application, Vienna further simplifies the low-code environment to easily combine data augmentation, pre- and post-data acquisition decisioning, and model operationalization. It also further simplifies the creation, visualization, testing, and debugging of decisions, and therefore reduces errors and biases in decisioning. In addition to these simplifications, Vienna adds new high-level expressions to make decision logic more compact and therefore easy to understand and modify. Decision tables, decision flows, and lookup models have all been affected by these enhancements, enabling projects, large and small, to take full advantage of these improvements.
For business users who operate the decisioning application, Vienna adds dedicated interfaces for them to not only author, but also test, promote, measure, and experiment on their decision logic. With an increasing number of automated tasks within the tool, business users’ productivity rises to higher levels. Business rules can drive the verification and processing of decision logic changes, automatically and seamlessly.
For IT people who first install SMARTS, Vienna comes with new interfaces to connect even more easily to external systems and services, whether on-premises or in the cloud. It also introduces new versions of all the REST decision service invocation SDKs, as well as for the .NET framework and . NET core decision components.
The Vienna beta-testing program has proven to be a success, as customers have provided significant input in the fine-tuning of the new capabilities. Sparkling Logic recognizes and thanks all the companies that actively participated.
Wrap-up of Vienna
- Further simplification of the low-code environment to easily combine data augmentation, pre- and post-data acquisition decisioning, and model operationalization
- Augmented user interface to further simplify the creation, visualization, testing, and debugging of decisions, and therefore reduce errors and biases in decisioning
- New high-level expressions, making decision logic more compact and therefore easy to understand and modify
- Dedicated interfaces for untrained users to author, test, promote, measure, and manage business apps
- New interfaces to connect even more easily to external systems and services, whether on-premises or in the cloud
If you want to learn more about the new version of SMARTS, register for this webinar or contact us for a demo or a free trial.
About
Sparkling Logic is a company at the forefront of technological innovation in decision management. We help businesses automate their operational decisions with a powerful decision management platform, designed for business analysts first.
Our motto is “your decisions, our business.” Using SMARTS, organizations have automated complex decisions in days, not weeks, or months. Our mission is to enable customers to implement the most demanding decisioning requirements and to easily maintain and improve them over time.
Sparkling Logic SMARTSTM (SMARTS for short) is a decision management platform that enables creating, testing, deploying, and improving automated data-based decisions in an integrated easy-to-use environment.
Unlike other tools that focus solely on the authoring and maintenance of business rules, SMARTS is decision-centric and focuses on measuring and improving business outcomes in the context in which our clients work, especially with complex regulations. Major enterprise customers like Equifax, First American, SwissRE, Centene, and NICE Actimize integrate SMARTS in their core systems.
Data vs. knowledge in automated decision management — Why not both?
In the tech industry, we also have our well-known “Coke vs. Pepsi”, “Avis vs. Hertz”, or “Mac vs. PC” debates. In the automated decision management category, the question that keeps coming up is “data vs. knowledge.” The aim of this blog post is to show that from a practical point of view, data and knowledge can be found in the same application. To do this, we will show it with SMARTS, Sparkling Logic’s decision management platform that allows users to combine data and knowledge without them entering the “data vs. knowledge” debate.
Origin of the debate
The “data vs. knowledge” debate dates to an old debate about whether knowledge about a subject should be hand coded or machine learned. A first camp of researchers and practitioners sought to encode this knowledge in the form of rules and an inference engine that runs on these rules to supply answers to user questions. A second camp sought to develop programs that learn from available data using statistical methods to generate models that can make predictions from unseen data. At Sparkling Logic, we support a pragmatic approach that consists in using data, knowledge, or both depending on the problem and the situation at hand.It is all about the situation
There is no such thing as a stand-alone decision management application. It is often built with the purpose of being integrated into a larger system for loan origination, risk management, product configuration, or other similar applications. As I wrote before, there is no one single approach. It is all about the situation.Data is everywhere, easy to collect, organize, and transform into predictive knowledge. So, if you have a lot of data, it may be better to build your decision management application around that data if the new observed data does not deviate too much from the old, learned data.
On the other hand, when you have knowledge whether in the form of rules or procedures, it is better to build your application around this valuable knowledge if it is easy to capture and code into the application.
If you have both data and knowledge, why not using the two, when you can do so in a modern decision management platform such as SMARTS, the subject of the next section.
The SMARTS way
SMARTS is a decision management platform that enables creating, testing, deploying, and improving automated decisions in an integrated platform. I will not detail it here, but you can find a brief overview of SMARTS on our blog page and a full description on our resources page. Instead, I will focus the rest of this article on how to use SMARTS when you have plenty of data or domain knowledge about the application you want to develop.You have plenty of data
For situations where you have plenty of data, SMARTS proposes two tools: RedPen and BluePen.
With RedPen, you write decisions in the form of rules using a use-case driven approach. A loaded data sample supplies the context for the rules and enables immediate execution and testing of each rule. RedPen mimics what subject-matter experts do when they flag decisions.
When you activate RedPen, you can pin an existing rule, a field of this rule, or a rule set and change it as if you were using a real pen on real paper. You can also create new rules with RedPen, SMARTS automatically turns them into executable rules.
On the other hand, BluePen lets you explore and analyze your data using your domain knowledge to find predictors. Then, using these predictors, you can generate a model in the form of legible rules and integrate them into your decision logic.
Using BluePen, you can engineer or change the models any time you need to. Without heavy investment in data analytics tools and efforts, you can evaluate BluePen models in simulations and quickly deploy them in the context of an operational decision.
You have domain knowledge
For situations where you have knowledge, SMARTS proposes two additional tools: SparkL and Pencil.
SparkL is Sparkling Logic’s language for writing rules in a natural language fashion. SparkL comes with everything you need to write rules —mathematical expressions, string manipulations, regular expressions, patterns, dates, logical manipulations, constraints, and much more. You can express any imaginable decision logic and symbolic computation, making it the choice for highly sophisticated decisioning applications where the conditions as well as the actions can take a wide variety of forms.
Pencil is our DMN compliant graphical decision design tool for uncovering, documenting, and sharing decisions with colleagues and partners. With Pencil, you just drag and drop graphical shapes to form a complete decision diagram. Then you add business logic to the graphical shapes and let SMARTS execute it.
Pencil helps you think about the ultimate decisions in a structured way, starting from the top-level decision to smaller sub-decisions. This iterative process is very friendly and amazingly easy to share with colleagues or partners working on the same project.
In addition to the above tools and language, SMARTS comes with a built-in dashboard to measure and improve business outcomes of the taken decisions.
You have both
If you are lucky enough to have both data and knowledge, you can leverage your models’ outputs by using it as the input to rules. For example, your loan management application could run a model that calculates a score and another model that calculates a risk and use that score and risk in a rule to calculate a price.
You can also do it the other way around, using the outputs of rules as inputs to your models that you would have trained with data. For example, your application might run a rule to classify a loan applicant, then run a model to calculate their risk of default and another model to calculate the price.
Whether you have data, knowledge, or both, SMARTS uses them as sources of information for the automation of your operational decisions.
Summary
- Data and knowledge do not have to be antagonistic. They can both be used as inputs to automate decisions.
- SMARTS is a modern decision management platform that enables their combination in an elegant and seamless way. For SMARTS, data and knowledge can be used as sources of information.
- When you have a lot of data, you can use RedPen to write rules without learning a special rule language or syntax, just starting with the data. You can also use BluePen to learn from data and turn it into rules.
- When you have knowledge, you can use SparkL to encode it into rules, from the simplest to the most complex rules that your application may require. You can also use Pencil when designing, documenting, and sharing your decisions are part of the requirements.
- Our mission is to enable customers to implement the most demanding decisioning requirements and to easily change and improve them over time. Whether you have data, knowledge, or both, we can help. Just contact us or request a free trial.
About
Sparkling Logic is a company at the forefront of technological innovation in decision management. We help businesses automate their operational decisions with a powerful decision management platform, designed for business analysts first.Sparkling Logic SMARTSTM (SMARTS for short) is a decision management platform that enables creating, testing, deploying, and improving automated data-based decisions in an integrated easy-to-use environment.
Hassan Lâasri is a data strategy consultant, now leading marketing at Sparkling Logic. You can reach him out at hlaasri@sparklinglogic.com.
SMARTS as regulatory compliance technology
So far, we’ve covered how to use SMARTS for decision management, micro-calculation, and data transformation. In this blog post, we show how you can use it to implement regulatory technology (regtech).
Regtech
Regulations, from Basel rules on bank capital requirement to Sarbanes-Oxley Act on corporate financial statements, to MiFID on pre- and post-trade transparency requirements across EU financial markets, have forced regulated companies to develop processes to find, assess and mitigate risks. To comply, investment firms, retail bankers, and insurance companies have turned to regtech for help.Regtech is an acronym for governance, risk, and compliance management technologies in companies, more particularly those working in highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, and healthcare. They allow the implementation of legal requirements in the nervous system of companies, in front-, middle- and/or back-office.
All regulations being prescriptive, it was natural that rule-based systems were among the first technologies used, with varying degrees of success which we will detail here, before showing how SMARTS overcame them.
SMARTS as regulatory compliance technology
Your data is uploaded and transformed in the same tool
Highly regulated companies must deal with continuous growth in transaction volumes and a massive accumulation of data that they must ingest or produce daily while constantly complying with ongoing regulations. They could do it, but they had to use other tools besides rules-based systems and they either had to connect them or transfer the data back and forth. With SMARTS, they don’t have to, since it allows data to be uploaded and transformed into rules or calculations in the same tool.
Your data is turned into insights and your insights into decisions
Before the widespread use of big data and analytics, investment bankers relied on complex analysis of information using statistical learning. Today, the entire financial services and insurance industry has integrated advanced data analytics into its artillery to detect market signals and predict market trends. The most advanced want not only to transform data into insights, but these insights into decisions. SMARTS was one of the only tools if not the only tool to offer an integrated solution to transform such companies into lifelong learning organizations where data helps find opportunities and risks, machine learning turns that data into knowledge and rules transforms this knowledge into decisions, thereby closing the virtuous circle that data promises.
You limit your risk for noise, errors, and biases
Since the advent of data, regulators have been closely monitoring the bias issues of automated decision-making systems, particularly those that rely solely on data and use machine learning to calculate scores and then decide instead of a human. In SMARTS, users implement decisions in the form of business rules, decision trees, decision tables, decision flows, and lookup models. All these intuitive representations make decisioning self-explainable so that they can test decisions individually as well as collectively. So, at any time, they can check potential noise and errors before they translate into biases.
Your data and transactions are tracked in real-time
A key need of the financial services industry is real-time responsiveness to suspicious events such as unusual transactions that may show fraud, money laundering, insider trading, or may not be unusual in themselves but nevertheless exceptional in relation to other transactions before or after. Based on their experience in the earlier generation of decision management systems, the founders of Sparkling Logic decided to integrate real-time decision analysis from the ideation of SMARTS. The product has always integrated a dashboard that tracks data and transactions so that the user can react by changing rules in real time.
You react very quickly before an error, an anomaly, or a fraud spreads
Companies must make thousands of complex risky decisions – monetary, reputational, and legal risks. For example, in every decision they make, there are tiered combinations of terms and conditions, legal constraints, eligibility criteria, and levels of risk involved. Rule-based systems allowed them to implement these decisions in the form of tables or decision trees, or rules, but at the expense of side effects on the business. With SMARTS, they graphically define KPIs and drag and drop them into a dashboard to visually check the impact of each decision or group of decisions on business performance. Users can also set thresholds and define patterns which if reached will trigger notifications and alerts. This way, the users will be able to react very quickly before an error, an anomaly, or a fraud spreads and results in enormous damage.
Your system is easy to maintain and upgrade
Prior to the emergence of regtech as a hot technology, highly regulated companies used rules engines to encode the directive logic of laws, regulations, and internal policies. Additionally, they could implement complicated decisions with tens of thousands or more if-then rules. All went well until they discovered that, like any hard-coded software, rule-based systems could be complex to maintain. With SMARTS, they don’t code and hope the code is correct. They create, test, deploy, run, monitor, and change graphically through web forms and point-and-click. Therefore, systems developed with SMARTS are easy to maintain and upgrade.
Wrap-up
The SMARTS is not strictly speaking regtech in the sense that it does not come with all the code of financial and insurance regulations, but it allows them to be implemented quickly and explicitly in the form of rules, trees or graphs. This makes the code easier to change if regulations change as they often do, such as Basel which is in its third version and MiFID in its second version.SMARTS not only eases the implementation of governance, risk and compliance rules, but it also facilitates their monitoring in real-time. SMARTS not only eases the implementation of governance, risk and compliance rules, but it also facilitates their monitoring. KPIs, dashboards and metrics were fundamental from the start of the product and not an afterthought once the product was released.
If you envision modernizing the implementation of a regulation, be it Basel, Sarbanes-Oxley, MiFID, GDPR, or any other regulation, SMARTS can help. Just contact us or request a free trial.
About
Sparkling Logic is a company at the forefront of technological innovation in decision management. We help businesses automate their operational decisions with a powerful decision management platform, designed for business analysts first.Our motto is “your decisions, our business.” Using SMARTS, organizations have automated complex decisions in days, not weeks, or months. Our mission is to enable customers to implement the most demanding decisioning requirements and to easily maintain and improve them over time.
Sparkling Logic SMARTSTM (SMARTS for short) is a decision management platform that enables creating, testing, deploying, and improving automated data-based decisions in an integrated easy-to-use environment.
Unlike other tools that focus solely on the authoring and maintenance of business rules, SMARTS is decision-centric and focuses on measuring and improving business outcomes in the context in which our clients work, especially with complex regulations. Major enterprise customers like Equifax, First American, SwissRE, Centene, and NICE Actimize integrate SMARTS in their core systems.
Software industry trends behind the digital transformation revolution
This article presents the three software industry trends driving the digital transformation revolution: DevOps, low-code / no-code automation, vertical integration with digital decisioning.
Introduction
The pandemic changed tech priorities for many people both at work and home making a ‘hybrid’ work a top initiative. Where and how we do the work accelerated the need to improve customer digital experiences and efficiency across work, shopping, and everyday chores.The data supports this new trend. The independent research firm Omdia compiled over 300 responses from executives at large companies indicated that working away from traditional offices will become the new norm. 58% percent of respondents said they will adopt a hybrid home/work. Even more interesting is that 68% of enterprises believe employee productivity has improved since the move to remote work.
Similarly, adoption of everyday on-line activities such as shopping, banking and entertainment further accelerated the pace of digital transformation. The need for improved applications increased the pressure on companies to relaunch efficient, friendly front-end customer apps with more intuitive UX. The back end now needs to support faster turnaround with the need to automate processes for the new on-line community of users demanding faster, cleaner, and more intelligent offerings.
To respond to this digital transformation, companies are rapidly adopting easy-to-use integrated enterprise software tools to optimize and accelerate development of these efficient digital products.
Several trends like DevOps, Low-code/automation and vertical integrations with integrated digital decisioning have emerged to help enterprises take the digital transformation journey faster and cheaper.
DevOps
DevOps is a software development concept bringing together historically disconnected functions in the lifecycle of the software development. Traditionally, business analysts would define the problem, developers would interpret the concept and build applications, and operations teams would test, report bugs and provide feedback. The disconnect between the functions, silo’d approach created inefficiencies, increased costs and slowed down application releases.The emergence of integrated tools and processes which integrate this multiple aspect of software development and promote collaboration between these different functions supported growth of the DevOps industry.
In fact, the market data shows that these trends are supported by the investment community and exit activity. According to Venture Beat, in 2Q 2021, Venture funding for global DevOps startups reached $4 billion and the exit activity deal value was dominated by the IPOs of UiPath (robotic process automation) and Confluent, (data / application integration platform).
Low code / no code automation
Application development is also coming closer to non-developers with low/no-code approach and automation.Software engineering, traditionally owned by IT and software engineers, has always been coveted by other, non-IT stakeholders in the enterprise. In 1991, Powerbuilder introduced a revolutionary concept of a development framework, aiming at democratizing development by allowing non-software professionals to get access to application development. Perhaps ahead of its time with clunky UX, WYSIWYG, Powerbuilder started the revolution of introducing emergence of ‘citizen-developers’, people who originally participated alongside IT in shaping the application and business models but could not code and create the applications themselves. It also introduced data integration with application logic and object-oriented concepts like inheritance and polymorphism and encapsulation, bringing software engineering to the masses.
Fast forward to 2020’s, virtually every enterprise tool platform and enterprise customer have adopted a low-code/no-code approach. The mission is the same as 30 years ago – to provide easy to use, graphical UI/UX, drag and drop concept to application development and allow business analysts, ‘citizen-developers’ and non-software engineers to create, test and even deploy enterprise applications.
Vertical integration with digital decisioning
The perennial challenge of allowing non-developers to create applications is the conundrum of how deep they can develop without coding and to what extent they can customize complex enterprise cloud applications without IT and coding.To accelerate digital transformation, enterprise software vendors are emerging mostly from the workflow / BPA world, such as Pega and ServiceNow. They are applying a two prong approach – core tool collection and vertical integration. The workflow vendors have developed (or acquired) a collection of point tools in a core-component framework. Those components typically include AI/ML, reporting, workflow, RPA (Robotic Process Automation), case management, rules engine, decision management, knowledge bases, BPA (business process automation) and process orchestration. Those components typically feature common UI and work across a normalized data model and unified architecture.
But that is not enough. To satisfy modern rapid digital transformation needs, in case of fintech enterprise customers (i.e. banks, insurance companies and financial services) also now require pre-built workflow, data and application models. These vertical templates are higher level and more specific, providing out-of-the box, drag/drop solutions like credit card operations, loan management and payment operations. Using the low-code approach, a business analyst can graphically drag/drop pre-defined steps into a loan origination workflow with pre-defined commonly used tasks, created using best practices defined by the ‘centers of excellence’. Companies like UIPath have created a 3rd party marketplace for additional steps and templates created by analysts and consultants. (Those steps could be ‘get customer data’, ‘OCR input form’, ‘scrub customer data’, authorize user’, ‘assess risk profile’ etc.).
Beyond the top level tasks, the functionality ultimately becomes more complex and the sophisticated customer needs powerful decision capabilities to introduce their own business rules and implement proprietary features. The ‘secret-sauce’, which separtes most common steps from proprietary concepts distinguishes top corporations from the competition, requires more sophisticated digital decisioning tools. These digital decisioning tools enable non-developers to customize and manage decision logic, implement AI/ML features, run A/B testing and visualize performance results on training and production data in real time.
To satisfy most common customer base, digital workflow vendors typically provide rudimentary business rules integrated in their low-code platforms and further integrate them with the downstream workflow platforms and vertical ecosystem vendors (i.e. FiServ, Jack Henry, SAP, Salesforce and FIS in banking for example).
The most sophisticated and demanding customers, however, need a more sophisticated set of digital decisioning tools like standalone professional DM platforms. To simplify and visualize this complex decision management, a new generation of low-code digital decision management platforms like Sparkling Logic emerged. These platforms integrate historical business rules engine, data and AI, demystifying machine-learning and providing low-code approach to development and monitoring of application logic performance, continuously as the business logic and training data change and drift.
The pandemic, hybrid work and pervasiveness of the cloud computing have irreversibly changed the software application development. Enterprise customers are seeking and deploying better, faster, more integrated software tools. DevOps integration, low-code, vertical templates, integrated AI and digital decisioning are becoming a new normal while defining the next generation of applications, created not only by software engineers, but by mere mortals across the enterprise.
About
Davorin Kuchan is the CEO of Sparkling Logic, Inc, an AI-driven digital decision management enterprise tools platform. Major enterprise customers like Equifax, Centene, First American, Nike, SwissRE and Enova deploy and integrate Sparkling Logic SMARTS digital decision engine. Sparkling Logic, Inc is based in Sunnyvale, California. http://www.sparklinglogic.comNoise reduction in digital decisioning with Sparkling Logic SMARTS
In this post, we present how to deal with the problem of noise, which is both a source of errors and biases in digital decision-making in organizations, through explicit decision rules, dashboards, and analytics. To illustrate our point, we use the example of the Sparkling Logic SMARTS decision management platform.
Noise in organizations’ decisioning and what to do about it
In an interview with McKinsey, Olivier Sibony, one of the renowned experts in decisioning, recommends algorithms, rules, or artificial intelligence to solve the problem of noise, a generator of errors and biases in decisioning in organizations. This recommendation resonates with our vision of automating decisioning — not all of the decisioning but the operational decisions that organizations make by thousands and sometimes millions per day. Think credit origination, claim processing, fraud detection, emergency routing, and so on.In our vision, one of the best ways to reduce noise, and therefore errors and biases, is to make decisions explicit (like the rules of laws) so that those who implement the decisions can test them out, one at a time or in groups, and visualize their outcomes in dashboards. Designers must be able to analyze the consequences of decisions on the organization before putting them into production.
Noise reduction with explicit decision rules, dashboards, and analytics
Our SMARTS decisioning platform helps organizations make their operational decisions explicit, so that they can be tested and simulated before implementation, reducing biases that could be a failure to comply with industry regulations, a deviation from organizational policies, or a source of an applicant disqualification. The consequences of biases could be high in terms of image or fees, and even tremendous for certain sensitive industries such as financial, insurance, and healthcare services.In SMARTS, business users (credit analysts, underwriters, call center professionals, fraud specialists, product marketers, etc.) express decisions in the form of business rules, decision trees, decision tables, decision flows, lookup models, and other intuitive representations that make decisioning self-explainable so that they can test decisions individually as well as collectively. So, at any time, they can check potential noise, errors, and biases before they translate into harmful consequences for the organization.
In addition to making development of decisioning explicit, SMARTS also comes with built-in dashboards to assess alternative decision strategies and measure the quality of performance at all stages of the lifecycle of decisions. By design, SMARTS focuses the decision automation effort on tangible objectives, measured by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Users define multiple KPIs through graphical interactions and simple, yet powerful formulas. As they capture decision logic, simply dragging and dropping any attribute into the dashboard pane automatically creates reports. Moreover, they can customize these distributions, aggregations, and/or rule metrics, as well as the charts to view the results in the dashboard.
During the testing phase, the users have access to SMARTS’ built-in map-reduce-based simulation capability to measure these metrics against large samples of data and transactions. Doing so, they can estimate the KPIs for impact analysis before the actual deployment. And all of this testing work does not require IT to code these metrics, because they are transparently translated by SMARTS.
And once the decisioning application is deployed, the users have access to SMARTS’ real-time decision analytics, a kind of cockpit for them to monitor the application, make the necessary changes, without stopping the decisioning application. SMARTS platform automatically displays KPI metrics over time or in a time window. The platform also generates notifications and alerts when some of the thresholds users have defined are crossed or certain patterns are detected. Notifications and alerts can be pushed by email, SMS, or generate a ticket in the organization’s incident management system.
Rather than being a blackbox, SMARTS makes decisioning explicit so that the users who developed it can easily explain it to those who will operate it. Moreover, the latter can adjust the decision making so that biases can be quickly detected and corrected, without putting the organization at risk for violating legal constraints, eligibility criteria, or consumer rights.
So, if you are planning to build a noise-free, error-free, and bias-free decisioning application, SMARTS can help. The Sparkling Logic team enjoys nothing more than helping customers implement their most demanding business requirements and technical specifications. Our obsession is not only to have them satisfied, but also proud of the system they build. We helped companies to build flaw-proof, data-tested, and scalable applications for loan origination, claims processing, credit risk assessment, or even fraud detection and response. So dare to give us a challenge, and we will solve it for you in days, not weeks, or months. Just email us or request a free trial.
About
Sparkling Logic is a Silicon Valley company dedicated to helping businesses automate and improve the quality of their operational decisions with a powerful digital decisioning platform, accessible to business analysts and ‘citizen developers’. Sparkling Logic’s customers include global leaders in financial services, insurance, healthcare, retail, utility, and IoT.Sparkling Logic SMARTSTM (SMARTS for short) is a cloud-based, low-code, AI-powered business decision management platform that unifies authoring, testing, deployment and maintenance of operational decisions. SMARTS combines the highly scalable Rete-NT inference engine, with predictive analytics and machine learning models, and low-code functionality to create intelligent decisioning systems.
Hassan Lâasri is a data strategy consultant, now leading marketing for Sparkling Logic. You can reach him at hlaasri@sparklinglogic.com.
Sparkling Logic turns data-driven businesses into learning organizations
Today, predictive analytics is common in any data-driven business. Typically, data scientists create predictive models first, and IT staff deploy these models in a production environment. At Sparkling Logic, not only have we streamlined this process, but we’ve extended it with prescriptive decisions. Sparkling Logic SMARTS AI & ModelOps is the third built-in capability of SMARTS to cover the full spectrum of operational predictive models, from importing models and creating new ones to initiating learning tasks. But let’s start with a brief overview of the stages data has gone through.
Data: a resource, an asset, a business
Until recently, data was a resource to conduct business and as such, it was typically managed by the CIO’s organization. The organization’s mission was to build the overall data architecture, to choose a database vendor, and to design all the applications necessary to process the data from the databases to the business and functional people screens. These applications were mostly reporting, letting the business get a sense for how the business has been doing based on the collected data.
Then came the first transformation, where data went from an asset used to understand how the business has been doing to being an asset leveraged to predict how the business could potentially do in the future. Reporting was enhanced by predictive analytics. The scope of the analytics was not only what had happened, but also what was happening and what could happen. In general, these two past-focused and future-focused activities cover most of what data science is in business, with some really important use cases on marketing, sales, and customer relationship management.
However, a new transformation is underway, first in the banking, insurance, and health sectors, but will certainly penetrate other sectors. It consists of transforming analytics into automated decisions, translating predictions into prescriptions. The goal of this transformation is to create a virtuous cycle where not only data is analyzed, but this analysis is transformed into decisions and actions that generate new data, and so on. Reporting and predictive analytics are now completed by prescriptive analytics.
Anticipating this trend, the founders of Sparkling Logic designed the SMARTS decision management platform to implement this cycle of data, insights, and decisions. Sparkling Logic SMARTS comes with a built-in AI & ModelOps environment that covers the full spectrum of operationalizing predictive models, from importing models built by data scientists, to creating new ones without prior knowledge of machine learning, to launching and managing learning jobs.
Sparkling Logic SMARTS AI & ModelOps
Predictive model import
Business analysts can import AI, machine learning, and deep learning models developed by data scientists, and leverage them in the decision logic. The models could be developed in Python, SPSS, SAS, or Project R among others. SMARTS integrates them as long as they are compliant to PMML, a standard for sharing and deploying predictive models, or are accessible as services.SMARTS supports importing as PMML neural networks, multinomial, general, and linear/log regression, trees, support vector machines, naïve bayes, clustering, ruleset, scorecard, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), random forest, and other machine learning models.
In cases where models exist but are only available as specification, business analysts can easily import these models and seamlessly transform them into business rules for full transparency and easy inspection.
There may be situations where it is necessary to call an external service that is available elsewhere. This external service can be a predictive model or a data source. SMARTS provides support for remote functions, which makes it possible to invoke an external service through JSON-RPC or REST services.
BluePen predictive technology
When time is of the essence, when models are short-lived or when expertise needs to be confronted with knowledge captured in the data, business experts can use the BluePen learning technology to quickly create a model, potentially leveraging existing models.
BluePen lets business analysts and business experts explore and analyze data using domain knowledge and expertise to identify predictors, or, alternatively, selects the predictors for them. Then, using the selected predictors, BluePen helps them to generate a model in the form of readable decision rules, tables, or trees, and integrate them into their decision logic.
Using BluePen, users can build meaningful predictive models in hours or days, rather than the months it often takes. Users can also engineer or modify the models. As a result, without heavy investment in data analytics efforts, these models can be tested, leveraged in simulations, and quickly deployed in the context of an operational business decision.
Regardless of the business analyst’s choice, he or she can operationalize a wide range of models within SMARTS. Being able to integrate models into decision logic is a central ability to test and measure the performance of the end-to-end decisioning.
Moreover, SMARTS allows the analyst to translate the insights from many different models into a decision. Typically, data-centric organizations will have many different models which each can contribute insights into what the decision should be. The orchestration of how these insights are combined is expressed in decision logic, turning multiple discrete predictions into actual prescriptive decisions.
The benefits of combining machine learning and automated decisioning as SMARTS does are nothing less than transforming businesses into always learning organizations where data helps identify opportunities, machine learning turns that data into insights and automated decisioning turns this information into action, closing the virtuous cycle that data promises.
Takeaways
- Data has moved from being a resource to assess how the business has been doing, to being an asset used to predict the future of the business, and finally to an asset used to improve automated decisions
- Sparkling Logic SMARTS comes with a built-in AI & ModelOps environment that covers the full spectrum of operationalizing predictive models, from importing models, to creating new ones, to launching and managing learning jobs
- With its AI & ModelOps capability, SMARTS helps in transforming businesses into learning organizations, closing the virtuous cycle that data promises. Data feeds analytics leading to improved decisions that generates additional data in addition to profits
About
Sparkling Logic is a decision management company founded in the San Francisco Bay Area to accelerate how companies leverage data, machine learning, and business rules to automate and improve the quality of enterprise-level decisions.
Carole-Ann is Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer at Sparkling Logic. You can reach her at cberlioz@sparklinglogic.com.
Low-Code No-Code Applied to Decision Management
Low-code no-code is not a new concept to Sparkling Logic. From the beginning, the founders wanted to deliver a powerful yet simple product, so that a business analyst could start with data and build decision logic with built-in predictive data analytics and execution decision analytics.
Version after version, they have achieved this vision through SMARTS, an end-to-end decision management platform that features low-code no-code for business analysts and business users to develop and manage decision logic through point-and-click operations.
Low-code development
For business analysts, SMARTS offers a low-code development environment in which users can express decision logic through a point-and-click user interface to connect data, experiment with decisions, monitor execution without switching between different tools to get the job done. Depending on the nature of the decision logic at hand and user preferences, business analysts can choose on the fly the most appropriate representation to capture or update their decision logic. The resulting decision logic is seamlessly deployed as a decision service without IT intervention.
To push the simplification even further, Sparkling Logic founders turned to their customers for inspiration on their needs and developed three complementary technologies:
- RedPen, a patented point-and-click technology that accelerates rule authoring without a need to know rule syntax or involve IT to author the rules
- BluePen, another patented point-and-click technology to quickly create or leverage a data model and put it into production without involving data scientists or IT
- A dynamic questionnaire to produce intelligent front-ends that reduces the number of unnecessary or redundant questions
No-code apps
In addition to low-code development capability for business analysts, SMARTS also elevates the decision logic to a simple web form-based interface for untrained business users. They can configure their decision strategies, test the updated decision logic, and promote the vetted changes to the next staging environment — without learning rules syntax.
These business apps offer a business abstraction for most tasks available in SMARTS related to configuration, testing and simulation, invocation and deployment management, as well as administration.
For example, credit risk specialists can configure loans, credit cards, and other banking products, and pricing specialists can control pricing tables, through a custom business app specific to their industry. The no-code business app enables business users to cope with environment changes whether they are related to internal policies, competition pressure, or industry regulation.
Furthermore, SMARTS tasks can also be automated through orchestration scripts. Business users can trigger these scripts through the click of a button, or schedule them to be performed automatically and seamlessly.
About
Sparkling Logic is a decision management company founded in the Bay Area to accelerate how companies leverage internal and external data and models to automate and improve the quality of enterprise-level decisions.
Sparkling Logic SMARTS is an end-to-end, low-code no-code decision management platform that spans the entire business decision lifecycle, from data import to decision modeling to application production.
Hassan Lâasri is a data strategy consultant, now leading marketing for Sparkling Logic. You can reach him at hlaasri@sparklinglogic.com.