Gaining insights with machine learning (ML) in Insights

Insights uses machine learning to help you uncover hidden insights and trends in your data, identify key drivers, and forecast business metrics. You can also consume these insights in natural language narratives embedded in dashboards.

Using machine learning (ML) and natural language capabilities, Insights takes you beyond descriptive and diagnostic analysis, and launches you into forecasting and decision-making. You can understand your data at a glance, share your findings, and discover the best decisions to achieve your goals. You can do this without developing teams and technology to create the necessary machine learning models and algorithms.

You likely have already built visualizations that answer questions about what happened, when, where, and provide drill down for investigation and identification of patterns. With ML insights, you can avoid spending hours manually analyzing and investigating. You can select from a list of customized context-sensitive narratives, called autonarratives, and add them to your analysis. In addition to choosing autonarratives, you can choose to view forecasts, anomalies, and factors contributing to these. You can also add autonarratives that explain the key takeaways in plain language, providing a single data-driven truth for your company.

As time passes and data flows through the system, Insights continually learns so it can deliver ever more pertinent insights. Instead of deciding what the data means, you can decide what to do with the information it provides.

With a shared foundation based on machine learning, all of your analysts and stakeholders can see trends, anomalies, forecasts, and custom narratives built on millions of metrics. They can see root causes, consider forecasts, evaluate risks, and make well-informed, justifiable decisions.

You can create a dashboard like this with no manual analysis, no custom development skills, and no understanding of machine learning modeling or algorithms. All this capability is built into Insights.

NOTE   Machine learning capabilities are used as needed throughout the product. Features that actively use machine learning are labeled as such.

With ML Insights, Insights provides these major features:

• ML-powered forecasting – Insights enables nontechnical users to confidently forecast their key business metrics. The built-in ML Random Cut Forest algorithm automatically handles complex real-world scenarios such as detecting seasonality and trends, excluding outliers, and imputing missing values. You can interact with the data with point-and-click simplicity.

• Autonarratives – By using automatic narratives in Insights, you can build rich dashboards with embedded narratives to tell the story of your data in plain language. Doing this can save hours of sifting through charts and tables to extract the key insights for reporting. It also creates a shared understanding of the data within your organization so you make decisions faster. You can use the suggested autonarrative, or you can customize the computations and language to meet your unique requirements. Insights is like providing a personal data analyst to all of your users.

Topics

• Understanding the ML algorithm used by Insights

• Working with insights in Insights

• Creating autonarratives with Insights

• Forecasting and creating what-if scenarios with Insights