Answer Your Questions and Solve Business Problems. Try AnswerRocket With Your Data!
On May 5th, AnswerRocket took to the virtual stage for the 2021 Gartner Bake-Off: Modern Analytics and BI Platforms.
The Bake-Off is a mainstay of the annual Data & Analytics Summit, and we were honored to be selected as a featured vendor, along with Tableau, Power BI, and Qlik.
You can watch AnswerRocket’s full demo at the Bake-Off below, or scroll down to read our synopsis.
The Bake-Off tasked industry-leading vendors with analyzing COVID-19 data to demonstrate their product capabilities and differentiators. Gartner provided vendors with data and the directive to review the state and efficacy of vaccination efforts, as well as other containment measures. Rita Sallalm, a VP Analyst at Gartner, hosted the event and gave expert commentary on key differentiators.
We approached the task with a number of questions:
- How are vaccines affecting mortality rates?
- Which countries and regions are performing well in their vaccination efforts?
- How will vaccines impact unemployment, and when will we start to see the effect?
Then, we leveraged AnswerRocket’s augmented analytics to analyze data, diagnose drivers, and predict future outcomes. Our Chief Data Scientist, Mike Finley, presented our findings to a live audience, including pandemic expert Donna Medeiros.
Here’s what we learned.
Insights Highlight Reel
To create a comprehensive picture of vaccinations, the AnswerRocket team combined various data sources, including data from:
AnswerRocket analyzed all of this data to generate insights like this:
The Insight: New deaths are down 4.8% worldwide
How We Got Here: AnswerRocket trended vaccinations and deaths from COVID using a RocketBot, a specialized analytical app that automates analysis and surfaces insights in the form of data stories. The most compelling insights were bubbled up to a browsable NewsFeed based on the end user’s interests. Whenever new data was added or existing data refreshed, the NewsFeed automatically generated insights, ensuring the most up-to-date vaccine information without prompting. The stories and insights you see in the NewsFeed below were all composed by AnswerRocket, using natural language generation.
The Insight: The majority of new vaccination increases month-over-month were concentrated in 3 countries: India, China, and the United States. Further, nearly 90% of the gains came from just 15 countries.
How We Got Here: AnswerRocket was able to answer a natural language query to produce these insights: “What were the new vaccinations given month over month by country in Mar 2021?” AnswerRocket understood we were looking to compare vaccinations across countries between two time periods. It produced a bridge chart showing month-over-month variance. It also generated natural language insights to explain the result and uncover additional interesting facts about the data.
The Insight: By June 5th, weekly vaccines will drive the unemployment rate below 4.5%
How We Got Here: With a natural language question (“When will weekly vaccines drive the unemployment rate below 4.5%?”), AnswerRocket generated an answer in seconds. AnswerRocket understood the intent of the question, selected the right machine learning Skill to answer it, and provided visualizations and insights that gave context to the answer. We used our Impact Skill, which leverages machine learning to predict an outcome based on modeling a scenario.
The Insight: When it came to containing the spread of COVID cases, countries with a higher prevalence of domestic travel restrictions and mass population testing measures faired better than those that relied predominantly on awareness campaigns.
How We Got Here: We used a custom Cluster Comparison Skill to automatically cluster different countries together based on their COVID testing rate and case rate, allowing the end user to easily compare containment measures between the leaders and laggards. While there is a Python code base powering this Skill, end users do not need to know how to work with code, they can simply ask a question or leverage a shortcut to invoke this interactive application.
This is how AnswerRocket enables operationalization of advanced analysis to business users.
Shifting the Dashboard Paradigm
With COVID data constantly evolving, meaningful insights must be 1) timely and 2) accessible to decision-makers.
Automation of analysis and insights generation achieves this. In our Bake-Off prep, it became increasingly clear that augmented analytics provides essential capabilities that traditional dashboards simply don’t possess.
While dashboards are important visualization tools that won’t be replaced anytime soon, they must be paired with accessible AI and machine learning techniques, as well as natural language technology, to enable end users to take action.
Our augmented analytics capabilities accelerate decision-making in the following ways:
- Conversational search with natural language processing enables frontline vaccination experts to get fast, up-to-date information on their own.
- Curated news and daily digests highlight insights based on interests, meaning end users get vaccination information without having to ask questions or trigger analysis in the first place. This helps to fill the gaps between what end users know to ask versus what they need to know.
- Skills leverage AI and machine learning to understand user intent, select the best possible model to answer questions, and automatically generate the appropriate insights and visualizations. End users have access to the best analysis techniques without having to learn SQL. Likewise, data scientists can fine tune models based on their in-depth knowledge with openly extensible AI.
AnswerRocket doesn’t approach data analysis from the same angle as dashboards. It’s not simply sitting on top of and visualizing data. It’s automating analysis, responding dynamically to the data, and enhancing discoverability.
We were thrilled to showcase AnswerRocket at the Bake-Off and demonstrate our unique perspective.
Do you have questions about AnswerRocket? Talk to our team!
Answer Your Questions and Solve Business Problems. Try AnswerRocket With Your Data!
