Combating Fraud by Combining Machine Learning and NLP

Rebates have long been ways brands have engaged their consumers. This is, however, prone to fraudsters whose techniques are increasingly sophisticated and continually changing. In collaboration with Mo-Data, YA decided to leverage data to improve fraud detection by creating a unique and dynamic way of identifying fraud as it happens. Human input data gathered in hundreds of millions of rebate submissions provides a corpus for spotting likely patterns in geography and submitter details that fraudsters use to overcome manual and automated checks. The solution implemented uses a combination of machine learning and NLP to initially identify fraud patterns, and then a further machine-learning loop selects the most likely submissions from the next batch based on initial findings. This allows the algorithm to keep up with the adaptive techniques used by the fraudsters. Finally, a human supervisor assesses each pattern to confirm fraudulent activity.

Career entrepreneur and SaaS industry veteran, Amit Tewari has co-founded and successfully led multiple startups and has been building distributed and highly scalable enterprise grade “hosted” software from the ground-up since 1999. The technology from one of Amit’s startups, ZANTAZ, acquired by Autonomy in 2008, eventually landed at HP, where it now forms an integral part of HP cloud.

Amit’s domain expertise includes storage management, distributed data processing, machine learning, eDiscovery, compliance archiving, enterprise search, content management, data protection, and disaster recovery. He has a penchant for simplifying cutting edge technology and making it suitable for enterprise usage. Amit co-invented and is patent holder for one of the first distributed data processing engines using commodity hardware, capable of processing a few terabytes of data per day using thousand plus node cluster.

Amit has an undergraduate degree in Technology from IIT Varanasi (IT-BHU) and an MBA.

Tom Senn is YA’s Vice President of Client Insights and Analytics. In this role, he works closely with the internal business and technology teams to deliver analytics and reporting to help YA clients make more informed decisions and obtain a greater return on their marketing investments.

Senn has a broad and diverse background in consumer insights and research. Most recently he was Vice President of Product Innovation and Consulting at Questar, LLC, a customer experience management company focused on the retail, restaurant, and healthcare verticals. Prior to that, Senn was with Aimia/Carlson Marketing as Director of Research and Customer Insights.

Senn holds a Master of Business Administration, Information and Decision Sciences degree from the University of Minnesota, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Actuarial Science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.