Download Vadis finished as the first EU company at KDD

Vadis beats over 400 competing companies and academic research institutes
in global Data Mining competition
Belgian company ranked as first European company at the top of the
annual global Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Cup
Vadis, the Belgian company which provides tailored Analytic Business Intelligence solutions, was the
first European company to be ranked in the best performers of the 2009 Global Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining Cup. Vadis finished on the 16th place, on a total of 259 participating teams from all
over the world, including Academic Research centers. As first European company in the top list, Vadis
marks Belgian leadership in the Data Mining industry.
The Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-09) is the most important international
conference in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery. It provides an international forum for
researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical
development experiences from all Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining-related areas including data
warehousing, machine learning, databases, statistics, knowledge acquisition and automatic scientific
discovery, data visualization, causal induction and knowledge-based systems.
Each year, the conference organizes a challenge in order to benchmark research and practitioners teams
from all over the world. This year’s challenge specifically focused on benchmarking the capacity of the
participants to build reliable predictive models on very large databases in a short period of time. For the
“Fast challenge” the teams had one week to build 3 models to predict appetency, churn, and crossselling on real data provided by the telecommunications company Orange. 15.000 variables were
provided, describing 50.000 clients. Each team had to download and pre-process the data, choose the
right modeling algorithm, build the best model, and submit the results within 5 days. With its predictive
modeling software RANK, Vadis was able to submit excellent models as of from the first day, just by
using the default full automatic settings of RANK.
RANK, the turnkey predictive modeling software
Based on the best academic and computing practices available today, Rank allows users to massively
produce predictive models, in an automatic, reliable and very fast way. Rank’s achieved objective is to
allow any business user to quickly build reliable models, using a proven embarked methodology, and to
fully understand the business insights discovered by the software.
Contrary to most of the commercial tools available today, Rank does not assume any prior knowledge in
statistics nor in machine learning: it does the complete statistical job for the user, and presents results in
a business friendly way. Claude Delcour, Partner at Vadis, verifies: “This approach radically differs from
the current trend of the market where tools compete on showing the most complete list of algorithms,
making them extremely difficult to use and heavy to deploy. As a consequence, Rank is the preferred tool
of business users, and of data mining teams that need to massively deploy predictive modeling under a
single methodological umbrella. Rank saves a lot of time and money in deploying predictive models”.
This is not the first time that Vadis ends in the top ranks of benchmarking competitions. At the PAKDD07
in Nanjing, China, they finished 6th (on 58) as the the first European team, and at the European
Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases
(ECML PKDD 2008) they ended 2nd on 150.
Thierry Van de Merckt, Partner at Vadis, comments: “The element of success of our approach lies in the
fact that Rank implements a real methodology in computing predictive models, which might take years
to qualified persons to discover and document. Rank is the combination of many good practices and
algorithms into a sound way, removing many time-consuming tasks from the analyst. We developed that
software because data miners do not always have the time nor the experience to implement good
practices in their company”. He continues: “We are very proud of these results, showing that Belgium
can be leading the pack in the Data Mining industry”.
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About Vadis
Vadis sa/nv, founded in 2004, offers tailored made Analytical Business Intelligence Solutions for its
customers to rapidly gain significant competitive advantage, market growth and leadership through the
detection of the best potential customers, their expected profitability, their risk of default, etc. Vadis
shows the way its clients can follow best, by using proprietary advanced methodologies developed in
their own R&D department in which more than 40% of their resources are invested each year. Vadis can
rely on strong partnerships with Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing, UCL, ULB, SAS and is supported
by IRSIB. This Belgian company has been competing for more than 3 years in the most prestigious
international modeling contests (KDD) and is usually ranked amongst the top worldwide performers.
Vadis is headquartered in Brussels and achieved a turnover above 2 Mio € in 2008 despite the financial
turmoil.