Nov/Dec 2014

Thanks big data! Now we’re even more data-rich … yet remain information-poor. After staggering investments motivated by an overabundance of buzz and hype, big data has yet to produce cases that reveal substantial verified return. Organizations are becoming harder pressed to show value, but they’re not sure where or how to draw it.

• Eric King

Even a cursory Internet search of fraud crimes delivers a multitude of results: the Little League secretary siphoning off a few thousand dollars, the trader known as the London Whale losing more than $6.2 billion for JPMorgan Chase, and hackers gaining access to customer information at major retailers and international banks.

• Drew Carter
• Stephanie Anderson

This article explores how to detect fraud among online banking customers in near real time by running a combination of learning algorithms on a data set that includes customer transactions and demographic data. The article also explores how the “cloud environment” can be used to deploy these fraud detection algorithms in short order to meet computational demands at a fraction of the cost it otherwise takes in setting up traditional data centers, and acquiring and codifying new hardware and networks.

• Saurabh Tandon

As you exit an eighth-floor elevator, Boston’s Financial District transforms into what feels like a university research lab: offices adorned with academic textbooks surround young employees receiving scholarly advice from senior mentors. Their efforts to crack the code of a new algorithm resemble the graduate research process. This is neither a university nor research lab, however.

• Mitchell Burman
• Lauren Berk

In all, this year's survey features 38 software packages from a total of 21 vendors, with some vendors listing multiple tools or multiple versions of the same tool. Eleven vendors from 2012 did not participate this year, but seven new ven­dors have joined the response list. And while some software packages are listed for the first time, many from the 2012 sur­vey have returned, albeit with some new features.

• William Patchak