I’m not talking about brain cells here, though using them always helps. I’m referring to the deluge of information that floods companies daily and a very simple equation: data + value = intelligence. Ideally, this translates into data that is curated, contextualised and enhanced, then delivered timeously as actionable insights. Just the kind of intelligence that Locstat LightWeaver®, our graph intelligence platform, provides.
How to add value
To begin with you need good quality data, aggregated from multiple sources to give you a more holistic perspective. Then you can transform and enrich it further before applying any of a variety of advanced analytics. There is a wide range of techniques available from predictive and prescriptive analytics to data mining, machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). All have something valuable to contribute, yet none of them are the complete package. When it comes to producing intelligence, combining them with graph technology to connect and contextualise your data offers the ultimate approach to next generation analysis.
Why choose graph intelligence?
As the evolution of advanced analytics, graph intelligence offers additional and enhanced capabilities. For a start, it prioritises the connection (edges) between entities (nodes), putting an emphasis on relationships. This focus gives a deeper understanding of how data points interact and influence each other. So you can analyse complex networks or social graphs and explore connections and patterns that emerge from the relationships.
It provides contextual insights by revealing hidden connections, uncovering communities or clusters and identifying important nodes within the graph. This facilitates more informed decision-making through an understanding of the broader context and dynamics of the data.
By analysing the structure and attributes of nodes and edges, it can identify recurring patterns or behaviours, detect anomalies or outliers and predict missing connections. The specialised algorithms are tailored to leverage the particular characteristics and properties of graphs resulting in more accurate and efficient analysis. Graph-based techniques also excel at examining intricate interdependencies and non-linear relationships often exhibited by complex networks, such as social networks, transactional environments and supply chains.
As detecting patterns is an important part of how our brains work, the insights generated by graph intelligence are simple to understand and communicate to stakeholders. Additionally, graph visual analytics provide intuitive and easily interpretable representations of complex networks for exploration and analysis, for business users and analysts alike.
Let’s get down to some specifics.
Patterns and anomalies
Distinctive patterns provide valuable insights into the underlying relationships and connectivity of the entities represented in the graph. For example:
- Specific hierarchical relationships, influence or control.
- Levels of authority, control or dependency, e.g. organisational structures, classification systems or levels of influence within a network.
- Processes, workflows or dependencies.
- Tightly knit groups or communities, e.g. in social networks or cliques within an organisation.
- Relationships between entities from different domains or categories, e.g. customers and products.
- A critical intermediary node that facilitates communication between different groups or communities.
- Feedback loops, repetitive processes, cyclical relationships or recurring patterns.
Anomalies in a graph refer to unexpected or unusual patterns, nodes, edges or behaviours that deviate from the norm or the predictable. These can help uncover suspicious activities, outliers, emerging trends or unexpected relationships. Identifying and analysing these can lead to valuable intelligence for decision-making, fraud detection, cybersecurity, risk assessment or system optimisation. For example:
- Individuals with an unusually large number of connections or interactions, e.g. a celebrity or influencer in a social network.
- An unusual connection between two individuals that might indicate potential collaboration or communication breakdowns, e.g. two people from different departments or teams who do not typically interact.
- Missing links, e.g. an absent road section in a transportation network graph.
- An unexpected connection between three nodes, e.g. collusion or conspiracy in a fraud detection graph.
- A sudden and significant increase in the number of connections involving a particular node, e.g. a sudden surge in network traffic or a targeted attack.
- A path or sequence of nodes that deviates from the norm, e.g. a non-standard route or sequence of intermediaries involved in the movement of goods in a supply chain indicating potential inefficiencies or deviations from established processes.
Now let’s put this into context.
Applying your intelligence
The power of graph intelligence lies in its ability to uncover hidden patterns, reveal contextual dependencies and provide a deeper understanding of data that goes beyond individual entity attributes.
By identifying influential nodes in a social network, you can discover who has the most connections or influence and who plays a central role in information flow. This can be used for targeted marketing, opinion shaping and identifying key influencers in various domains.
Analysing patterns of connections or interactions can reveal groups of nodes (community detection) that share similar characteristics or behaviours. Understanding subgroups, common interests or functional units within a network allows the detection of cross account and channel collaboration, micro segmentation on the fly, 1-to-1 or 1-to-few recommendations or improved comprehension of social structures. When it comes to recommender systems, it can identify relevant items, products or content that might be of interest to a particular user. This type of micro-segmentation and next best action adds immense value to e-commerce, content platform or personalised marketing strategies.
Path analysis determines the shortest or most efficient paths between nodes. This makes it ideal for tracing the flow of information, pinpointing potential bottlenecks or analysing the spread of influence or impact across a network.
If it’s semantic understanding that you’re after, then you’re onto a winner. By linking entities with their attributes, relationships and contextual information, representing knowledge in a graph structure enables advanced search, semantic querying and knowledge discovery. This helps in the comprehension of complex relationships, answering complex questions or exploring semantic connections in many domains, such as fraud prevention or enterprise knowledge management.
So, while other advanced analytics methods like ML, statistical analysis and NLP focus on different aspects of data analysis, graph intelligence provides a unique perspective by leveraging the inherent structure and relationships in the data.
But why not have it all?
Versatility and flexibility
Graph intelligence offers a powerful analytical approach for interpreting complex data structures and extracting valuable insights. Plus, its scalability, flexibility, explainability, real-time analysis capabilities and business value make it a compelling choice for a wide range of applications and use cases. However, graph on its own is not the panacea, you can’t just “plug and play” a graph database and expect all of these wonders to drop into your lap.
Aware of the enormity of its potential, we built an ecosystem of tools and capabilities to unleash the full power of graph. These include real-time streaming, distributed computation, graphML, NLP, predictive and prescriptive analytics, a strong rules engine, complex event processing and a data fabric approach to connect all your data from any source. And it’s all wrapped up in a quick to implement graph intelligence platform to enhance the accuracy and comprehensiveness of your analysis.
As a light touch implementation that augments your existing architecture, you can have multiple point solutions with one vendor. This reduces costs, saves time, resolve multiple complex business problems and delivers rapid ROI. You also don’t have the headache of building and maintaining in-house, yet you still get the many benefits that our solution and expertise provides. Sounds like a win-win to me.
But why not see for yourself and contact us for a demo?
Use your intelligence: choose Locstat
