What is Associative Analytics?

By saffrontech On October 29, 2012 · Add Comment

Associative Analytics: Brain-like BI for business
Just as your own brain works, Saffron’s associative analytics captures and stores the associations between people, places and things. This brain-like memory of every thing and how it is connected, includes the frequency counts and all of the context in which everything occurred. These memories of every thing are the basis for Associative Analytics.

Associative memories are just like human memories
For example, everyday we use associative memory to identify colleagues from various parts of our lives. It is the associations contained in these relationships which matter – “did we attend University together? When, where?” or “Who introduced us? When, where, why, who else was there?” “you remind me of a friend…. how are you similar? Or dissimilar?”

Storage and Retrieval of associative memories
Your own brain naturally sees and stores these associations and retrieve them as connection, similarity, time and geospatial patterns. We count frequencies of associations naturally. We know if someone is a close friend or a social acquaintance. Often our remembrances of people, restaurants, movies, or other interactions are sparked by something else – a song, a city, a wintery day on the ski slopes or a summer day at the beach.

How we use the power of associations everyday
Standing recently at the city marina in St. Petersburg, Fl., I remembered the last time I was here was to go day sailing with my husband Mike and brother Gary. Gary, a power boat enthusiast, had never sailed before, so we were all looking forward to getting on the water. The morning started out with beautiful skies and perfect winds….however as weather tends to do in the Gulf in the early afternoon the lovely weather changed quickly into rain and thunderstorms….”. In this way, humans use associative analytics every day. The location of “marina” in the “city” of “St. Petersburg” provoked memories of associations with other people (Mike and Gary) and events (sailing, thunderstorms), time (morning, afternoon), and additional context such as beautiful skies, perfect winds, rain and thunderstorms. Without completing the story, we can even anticipate how the day finished given our experience with day sailing, rain and thunderstorms….”so we headed back to shore”.

Associative memories free from rules and models
Saffron uses this same method of representation of and reasoning from knowledge to inform and help us understand the world in which we and our intelligence targets interact.
Just like our brains, Saffron does this in real-time, but without rules or models to bound our thinking. Just like our brain, we unify many data sources and types into one knowledge base. Just like our brain, we can quickly focus on the details that matter in a given situation. And just like our brain we rapidly learn and adapt to a changing world.

So how do associative memories matter in analytics?
By bringing this human way of thinking to big, complex data sets, in real time, Saffron helps you uncover opportunities (or threats) much more quickly, completely than your competitors (or enemies) can. You can find answers to questions that were not anticipated, see patterns too hard to observe otherwise and leverage the relevant experience of your organization in decision making.