AI Predictive Analytics: Bitvore Backtests its Precision Intelligence Against Amazon’s Major HQ2 Decision

In September 2017 Amazon announced that they were accepting Request for Proposals (RFPs) across Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. to establish a second headquarters in addition to their main location in Seattle, Washington. More than 200 cities heeded the call and submitted proposals filled with promises of tax, construction, and community betterment incentives.

Amazon ended up announcing two new locations in November 2018. Our company decided to use this huge corporate decision, which ran heavy in the news with business, industry, and government speculation for over a year, as a way to showcase how our precision intelligence can be used in predictive analysis.

Backtesting

Our Amazon HQ2 predictive experiment makes use of what data scientists call backtesting. This is where a predictive model is used on historic data to test its validity. Such testing is heavily relied on in the financial industry to give informed guidance on investments and strategy. Normally backtesting relies on quantitative data, and not quantified, organized and normalized news data. We had a goal to see if we could predict the finalists and chosen cities in Amazon's HQ2 decision using all the data available to us from our various products.

Who is Bitvore?

Our platform consumes massive amounts of world business news and runs that data through our proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) platform that identifies only the most important business material events. The resulting data helps businesses make better decisions, faster.

Our products are deployed in over sixty of the world’s largest financial institutions, allowing them to rapidly create augmented intelligence solutions to address their unique business requirements.

How does business benefit?

Our AI tools enable business to make sense of the overabundance of information and news in real time.

Using our AI platform to monitor and analyze hundreds of thousands of articles a day can cut down on fruitless searches that yield completely unrelated and useless business data.

For an example, 10 hours worth of internet searching and going through tracked data (such as Google Alerts) can be narrowed down to 10 minutes of searching through intelligently analyzed information from Bitvore.

Not only are AI tools more efficient, but information can be captured in a way not possible with traditional internet search & track. This helps business respond faster, be more proactive, and grow intelligently.

Amazon HQ2 Predictive Analysis Test

Our Amazon HQ2 study was reviewed at three critical stages of the entire process:

• Amazon’s call for headquarter RFPs in September 2017
• The shortlisting of 20 cities in October 2017
• The final headquarters announcement in November 2018

The resulting white paper, highlighting the predictive value of our AI-processed news datasets, includes the following:

• Predictive Experiment Description
• Experimental Design
• Calibration & Prediction Methods
• Scoring
• Final Results
• Predictive Model Validation

Download our white paper for a closer look at Using AI Processed News Datasets to Perform Predictive Analytics.