Data for good: Protecting consumers from unfair practices

But given the exponential increase in complaints year over year, how can the CFPB not only keep up, but help more people with the wealth of data they have? For instance, is there a way for them to quantitatively assess the data for various trends? Is there a better way to discover the areas of greatest concern for consumers and help address those problems on a macro-level, before they become unmanageable? "Adding more readers for a manual analysis of the text is not the answer," says SAS' Tom Sabo, who has explored the problem at length. "First, unless very specific standards are adopted, the method that one reader uses to address and tag a complaint can be quite different from the method a second reader uses. Scale this difference up to many readers, and you have many different, qualitative interpretations of the textual data."