Anaplan Models With Machine Learning Model Feeds

nsareen

Hi Ana planners

I was curious to know if anyone has any exposure on building Anaplan models integrated with ML models feeds deployed in other cloud environments such as google cloud services.

 

Anaplan conducted some POC with google in exploring the possibilities of leveraging ML capabilities on Anaplan.

Does anyone know on more details on the POC Anaplan performed or something similar that any of the community members might have worked on?

 

Thank you !

 

 

JaredDolich

@nsareen 

This is one of my favorite topics.

There are a ton of models on the app hub you can download. This link shows you all the apps with "forecast" in it but you can narrow it down by industry or by type.

https://community.anaplan.com/t5/custom/page/page-id/ApphubApps?q=forecast

 

I'm not familiar with the POC you mentioned but in my experience, regression methods are well suited in Anaplan as long as you build the auditing and business rules in Anaplan. For example, I used a seasonal ARIMA model (Holt-Winters) to detect trend for a retail client. I had to set up a lot of exception flags in Anaplan so the forecasts didn't fly all over the place. Each week, new data would be loaded and the forecasts would adapt to the new information. The exception flags (and successive trips) help identify the nuances (like when a new store opens, a new product is introduced, store was closed due to weather, consecutive errors in the same direction - that sort of thing.)

 

If you are using some type of deep learning method, then you'll probably want to do that outside of Anaplan. I use Knime which is an open-source ML tool.

 

Classification methods, like clustering, seems better suited outside of Anaplan because of the iterations that need to take place. I usually use Python or R. And since Anaplan's API set can be called from either of these, so it's very convenient. You can even put them on a scheduler to improve the automation.

 

You can go pretty far with this. But hooking up Anaplan to your statistical models is not that difficult - you'll just need to make an investment of time to learn the data integration with Anaplan. Good news is that Anaplan's documentation is excellent, not to mention this Community Site. Most likely, someone has already tried to do what you're doing.