Why do you need a key driver analysis engine?

For decades, businesses have relied on dashboards and reports to understand their key metrics. However, with the exponential growth in data volume and the rapid fluctuations of metrics, keeping up with the constantly evolving data to provide actionable insight in a timely manner has become a formidable task for the data team. In this article, we will introduce the problem of the BI tool and how DSensei, the open-source AI-powered key driver analysis engine would solve the problem.

‍Problem of BI tools

Existing BI tools excel at presenting current state (“What”) and the fluctuation history (“How”) in key metrics like daily active users (DAU), revenue, session time, etc. However, they fall short when it comes to providing insights into the underlying reasons behind fluctuations ("why").

In today's data-driven world, the ability to comprehend the causes of metric fluctuations and take appropriate actions based on those insights in a timely manner is critical to business success. A lot of times even minor changes in overall metrics may be connected to significant shifts in specific segments. However, current BI tools do not provide an efficient way of understanding the “why” behind a metric fluctuation. As a result, manual work is required to examine the numerous segments under the metric using various slice-and-dice queries followed by a custom script to sort and summarize, which often takes hours or even days of manual work.

‍

DSensei empowered key driver analysis

DSensei replaces the manual work by employing statistics and AI technologies to holistically analyzes all the segments, group the correlated ones together, and indicate the ones that are the key drivers of the metrics fluctuation. The whole process only takes seconds to minutes depending on the dataset. With these swift insights, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of the underlying reasons behind metric fluctuations and promptly devise action plans.

Besides the improvement in the time to action, DSensei enables users to make sense of granular segments, complementing traditional BI tools which lack the ability to drill down into the details of that data. By revealing hidden insights from these data segments which are typically invisible to conventional tools, DSensei empowers users to gain a deeper understanding of their data, which leads to more comprehensive and informed decision-making.

Try out DSensei

We have just launched the MVP of DSensei. You can try out our live demo with data in csv format. Or if you have any concern about your data security and privacy, you can host and run DSensei locally to do all the analysis without any data leaving your computer! Please check out our github repository for more detail.

We are currently actively developing new features and integration to DSensei, please reach out to us via email or discord group for any feedback and suggestions. Thanks!