Project Omnivore

Ben at Mailchimp has posted some information about Project Omnivore. This is a predictive system that not only predicts potential abuse, but can also be used to predict poor campaigns. Steve and I had a chance to see Omnivore in action when we were in Atlanta last fall, and were impressed by the accuracy for bad stuff. It seems, however, that Omnivore is useful to predict good behaviour as well.

The reason we built Omnivore was because we wanted to change the way we think about abuse. The project involved so much data crunching that it resulted in some interesting byproducts. Our subject line suggester is one example, as well as the engagement ranking and segmenting tools we mentioned earlier.

[...]Omnivore is learning more every day, and is actually getting good at predicting not just bad behavior, but good behavior too.