New partnership launched to improve IT analytics

Imperial begins Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with CONTEXT and Innovate UK to develop predictive analytics capabilities for the IT industry.

Imperial’s Mathematics Department is proud to announce their latest partnership with CONTEXT, a leading global IT market research and business intelligence provider, which will produce an industry leading predictive analytics platform.

The project is co-funded by Innovate UK and CONTEXT, through a KTP framework that is proven to produce benefits for the UK economy and to both partners.

The IT market research industry has limited capacity to produce accurate sales demand forecasts and future market performance indicators due to the volatility and complexity of the industry, as well as a lack of data.

As a result, currently available performance forecasts are heavily influenced by individual analysts’ inputs and educated estimations, leading to high levels of inaccuracy when comparing initial forecasts to actual sales performances historically.

The new partnership will work to create a more formal forecasting methodology.

Bringing CONTEXT to Imperial

CONTEXT, which manages the largest database of IT hardware transactional sales and pricing information in the world, hosts one of the few viable datasets that can provide the building blocks for a formal forecasting methodology. They are now investing heavily in new analytics and BI capabilities, which brought them to Imperial with this specific challenge to solve.

Beginning on 1 December 2018, the two-year project to build a flexible forecasting platform will be led by Dr Yang Zhang, an experienced associate researcher who has held hybrid industry-academic posts at Nottingham University. Dr Zhang’s experience and drive to apply novel research to real-world applications is set to drive the project to become an academic and commercial success.

Throughout the project she will also host regular ‘Forecasting Research Group’ meetings, which will bring together some of the brightest analysts in the industry who tackle the issue of accurate forecasting availability on a monthly basis. Together, they will steer the development of the platform, to ensure commercial feasibility and application.

Benefitting research and the economy

The academic supervision and leadership for the project will be provided by Professor Niall Adams and Dr Din-Houn Lau of Imperial’s Mathematics Department.

Dr Lau was previously funded as a postdoctoral researcher by Innovate UK, so is perfectly placed to undertake the role of Knowledge Base Supervisor for the project. He is now a Group Leader in the Data-Centric Engineering programme led by the Alan Turing Institute. Professor Adams is Head of the Statistics section at Imperial and has extensive industrial collaborations across a variety of sectors/sizes, including cyber-security, banking, startups and UK government.

The Mathematics Department expects that this project will result in a valuable impact case study for a future Research Excellence Framework exercise. Further collaborative work with CONTEXT and the Forecasting Research Group may also develop, along with new Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.

This is a fantastic opportunity to advance this field of research further, whilst simultaneously benefitting the UK economy.