Pecan

Pecan is a predictive analytics platform as a service (PaaS) designed to simplify and expedite the process of creating and implementing predictive models in different customer-oriented use-cases.

Pecan, the vendor, is quite an innovative predictive analytics PaaS company that develops state-of-the-art automated and general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, capable of achieving great accuracy in a wide variety of use cases. Pecan, the software, is very capable of making the process of building and deploying predictive models relatively easy and code-free. It is touted as business intelligence (BI)-friendly predictive analytics meets business, a user-friendly predictive analytics platform that doesn’t require data scientists to successfully solve critical business problems for revenue-driven operations and collaborative teams.

The predictive analytics platform works to simplify and speed up the process of building and deploying various predictive models that are geared towards different customer-based use cases, such as lifetime value (LTV), next best offer (NBO), churn and segmentation. By using Pecan, marketing and sales teams, as well as business intelligence operations, can easily forecast or predict mission-critical outcomes without even requiring the expertise of data scientists.

Pecan allows for more simplified data preparation, such as automated feature engineering, raw data ingestion and predictive models optimized for high performance in a variety of individual use cases. The software utilizes traditional data modeling approaches, which helps accelerate the model deployment process by mere weeks, instead of months. With the ease of use in mind, the platform allows users to simply plug in their data sources and the system will automatically initiate a variety of processes such as data cleansing and encoding, as well as data restructuring and imputation.

Pecan’s proprietary AI algorithms are capable of training and optimizing the predictive models to capture the best possible outcomes in a quick and efficient manner. The predictive analytics software is structured for various projects and models, helping marketing and sales teams to remain focused on the key performance indicators (KPIs) of their operation, regardless of the type of model that is being deployed. Pecan also gives its users the ability to connect the system to various data sources via a code-free integration process, without the need to modify or manipulate any of their databases.

A simple yet highly efficient drag-and-drop user interface (UI) allows businesses, teams and individual users to generate machine learning (ML)-ready data sets in no time.

Pecan Features

Pecan is primarily designed to drive business value from AI technology. With a single highly intuitive platform, business users, analysts, marketing and sales teams can easily incorporate relevant data from various sources, derive and implement off-the-shelf predictive models and determine potential outcomes, finally bringing automated machine learning within reach of businesses and organizations, regardless of size and scale.

One of Pecan’s core features is its automated data preparation. Prepping big data manually can be a huge labor- and time-intensive process when it comes to predictive analytics, adding weeks sometimes even months to the project timeline. However, with Pecan’s automated data preparation feature, teams and individual users simply have to plug in their data sources and the PaaS solution will automate most of the key processes such as the data cleansing and encoding, the data restructuring and imputation, as well as the features selection and engineering.

Pecan’s modeling and enrichment capabilities are among the most important features of this highly innovative predictive analytics platform. Its proprietary AI algorithms can efficiently optimize and train various predictive models to easily get to the more effective outcomes as quickly as possible, without sacrificing the science of it all. However, in predictive analytics drift and leakage can be detrimental to the accuracy of predictive models. To alleviate this issue, Pecan’s AI continuously monitors and optimizes the models so they become more accurate over time. It will even enrich the predictive models with relevant data from external sources to get to the results faster.

Highly organized dashboards and actionable data are core features of Pecan. The platform is organized into projects and models by design to ensure actionability. This approach allows sales and marketing teams to remain focused on what’s important when it comes to predictive analysis, the business key performance indicators or KPIs, irrespective of the model type you’ve chosen to approach them with. When the time comes that taking the appropriate action becomes necessary, Pecan’s predictions will easily connect at the data source so all data sets are immediately accessible to the user and the entire team to act on.

Pecan’s predictive analytics platform is also equipped with several advanced features to ensure actionable and accurate predictions. The first step in creating a usable predictive model is the data set maker. The platform allows users to naturally connect to a host of databases through no-code integration, with no database manipulation. Once they’re connected, a simple drag-and-drop interface is available to make it easier and much quicker to create data sets that are already fully optimized for machine learning.

The next step involves the data enrichment feature. You can boost the efficiency of your newly created predictive models by utilizing the data enrichment function. The data enrichment process draws relevant data from global sources to your predictive analysis, which enables the system to arrive at more accurate and relevant outcomes, faster.

Then there’s Pecan’s auto-prep function. This allows you to automate a few key processes, such as feature engineering, feature selection and encoding. This will not only help you and your team save time on possibly one of the most complex and time-consuming aspects of the predictive analysis process but also allows your results to continuously improve as the platform constantly optimizes and trains your predictive models. The auto-prep function also prioritizes features as their importance evolves and changes over time.

The automated machine learning feature allows you to match the nature of your data, its scope as well as the predictions that you’re looking to acquire by constructing a significant number of deep neural networks. Through an extensive set of recursive computations among multiple neural networks, the system will then be able to come up with a single fully trained and optimized network that is well-refined and uniquely evolved for accuracy and optimal performance.

Continuous data monitoring and analysis is another valuable feature of Pecan. When you first use this predictive analytics platform, you can expect to obtain fairly reliable predictions within just a few days. However, the system doesn’t stop there. Pecan’s AI-driven optimization will continue to analyze the data in order to produce even better and more accurate predictions over time. A live dashboard is available to help you make data-driven decisions as far as your next actions are concerned. It will also allow you to closely monitor performance.

Pecan Benefits

Pecan’s BI-friendly predictive analytics platform enables companies to accelerate their sales, improve the customer experience and optimize their supply chain. Having the ability to gain valuable foresight into the key metrics of an operation provides a huge advantage to any business. It doesn’t just give users the power to focus on what matters most to their team, but it also enables them to create strategies that are both data-driven and future-driven.

From predicting demand to conversion modeling and churn, Pecan’s fairly accurate predictive insights have the potential to inform customer acquisition and retention strategies, resource planning, production and distribution, packaging and pricing; all of which are crucial to any business or marketing team that relies on accurate outcomes on any of the aforementioned metrics.

A major benefit of using Pecan is the fact that using it doesn’t even require the knowledge and expertise of data scientists. With this predictive analytics platform, you can easily avoid the unnecessary commitment and added cost of hiring said scientists. By implementing this platform and incorporating it into your current technology stack, you’re effectively giving your analysts and strategists the ability to take full advantage of their SQL skills and analytics expertise on true AI technology. They should have the opportunity to create complex predictive models using robust automated processes.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to using this predictive analytics platform is how it can make otherwise sophisticated processes easier and less overwhelming to non-technical users. Users can fully utilize the true potential of Pecan’s AI technology without ever writing a single line of code. They can simply use the drag-and-drop interface to manipulate the raw data and then let the automated data prep feature and model building take care of the rest.

Pecan Pricing

Pecan’s pricing information has not been made available to the general public. Interested parties will have to contact the vendor directly through their official website to request a demo and/or ask for a custom quote.

Conclusion

Pecan is a BI-friendly predictive analytics platform that is specifically designed to solve a plethora of critical business and marketing-related challenges for operations teams and revenue-driven users. With just a single intuitive and powerful platform, business users, marketing teams and analysts can easily incorporate relevant data, deploy well-optimized predictive models and visualize prospective outcomes within just weeks, instead of months.

Pecan is a fairly innovative predictive analytics platform delivered through platform-as-a-service or PaaS. It is aimed at businesses and teams of all sizes and scale, from small marketing and sales teams to large enterprises and global conglomerates. The best part is how the system can be easily integrated with a wide variety of third-party solutions and servers.