dunnhumby to Launch Model Lab for Enterprises

Tesco-owned customer data firm dunnhumby is preparing to launch an enterprise edition of its Model Lab machine learning automation tool for data scientists, built on cloud computing service Microsoft Azure. The tool will initially be available in the US.

dunnhumby analyses more than 395 million shopper baskets and nine billion data records every week, helping thousands of brands and suppliers in the grocery and drug sectors to understand how each of their individual products is performing with different types of shopper. Last year, the firm moved its customer insights products across to Microsoft Azure, aiming to give more retailers and suppliers instant access to shopper and business insights.

Launched last September, Model Lab is designed to solve retail challenges such as understanding customer churn and predicting propensity to purchase, including instore versus online. The solution automates data scientists' repetitive, time-consuming tasks, using machine learning technology to reduce run time and allow staff to explore.

Victor Robin (pictured), the firm's Data Science Director, says that since launch, demand has grown with numerous requests to expand the user limit and dataset size. The enterprise edition is being developed in response to this, and will support an unlimited number of users, meeting the needs of large data science teams. The new edition will be available in March.

Web site: www.dunnhumby.com .