How Experian is turning big data into big dollars

At Experian DataLabs in Carmel Valley, a team of scientists is thwarting bad guys with math. A top-five U.S. credit card issuer recently dumped about 6 billion transaction records on Experian DataLabs to see if its fancy machine learning mathematical formulas could do a better job of rooting out credit card fraud than the bank's existing system. Experian scientists used neuro-embedding/natural language processing techniques to understand the "syntax" of the credit card data, said Honghao Shan, a Ph.D. computer scientist. "We thought we had figured it out and went back to them," said Eric Haller, head of Experian DataLabs. "They said, how did you do that? You identified fraud that we can't identify ourselves. And it turns out we reduced their false positives by half."