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 for inventions underlying solutions in predictive analytics, optimization, and fraud detection.

These patents were awarded to members of the FICO Labs team.

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 covers 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. The company received a patent for its “fuzzy” matching technique that can determine if a given computer-readable record is represented, by exact match or substantially close match, in a large collection of computer-readable records. This is useful in detecting identity fraud.

The final patent is for technology used to identify credit card or similar fraud based on account-level factors rather than transaction-level factors.

“We’ve been awarded 22 new patents within the last year, which is a strong indication of the creative ingenuity of our team and our focus on new areas of discovery,” said Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO and head of FICO Labs.

“Analytics are more critical than ever to making successful business decisions and achieving maximum performance from business operations,” said Dan Vesset, program vice-president of business analytics research at IDC. “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.”

 

For more information please go to:

http://www.fico.com/en/Company/News/Pages/05-19-2011a.aspx