Microsoft weeds out fake marketing leads with Naïve Bayes and Machine Learning Server

To connect with potential customers, our marketers and sellers at Microsoft depend on good-quality leads. But sometimes people fill out online forms with fake names, gibberish, or even profanity. We distinguish fake company names from legitimate names in our data using the programming language R, the Naive Bayes classifier algorithm, Microsoft Machine Learning Server, and a data quality service that we built. This solution helps us weed out fake names and prioritize good leads for our sales and marketing teams.