FICO, a provider of analytics and decision management technology, announced that it has been awarded four new patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. These patents were granted for inventions underlying FICO solutions in predictive analytics, optimization and fraud detection.
The first patent is for technology that mines transaction data for predictive trends, using genetic algorithms to find the most potent transformations of transactional data. This technology, which is behind the Data Spiders module in FICO Model Builder, is used by FICO clients today in a variety of applications, such as improving targeting for cross-selling and conversion, improving fraud detection and predicting online purchase decisions.
The second patent provides an architecture for optimal strategy design using both historical data and human expertise. This architecture defines decision models as a visual influence diagram, translates the influence diagram to a nonlinear optimization problem and derives decision rules that achieve mathematically optimal strategies.
The other two new patents are for new technologies which bolster FICO’s fraud detection and prevention capabilities. FICO received a patent for a fast, accurate “fuzzy” matching technique that can quickly and accurately determine if a given computer-readable record is represented, by exact match or substantially close match, in a large collection of computer-readable records.
“We’re seeing increasing evidence that organizational performance and competitiveness can benefit from better and more business analytics, which is why the analytics industry is poised to continue its rapid growth in the years to come”, said Dan Vesset, program vice president of business analytics research at IDC.