Version 3.0

Introduction

Othot is pleased to announce release 3.0 of the Othot platform. The release adds a variety of new features and enhancements, as well as significant improvements to overall performance and predictive capabilities.

If you have any questions regarding the contents of this document or require additional information on any updates contained in this release, please reference other Othot Help Center articles or contact Othot Support at support@othot.com.

Signal 

In order to provide more proactive insights to users, a new event and reporting system has been added to the platform.

Signal Reports

Scheduled analysis of your data will run automatically to provide important insights regarding increases or decreases towards your institutional goals. Email notifications will be sent to guide interested users to a snapshot analysis of the state of your class highlighting what changed and, in some instances, why.

Signal Events

During active predictions, data comparisons and analysis will be done looking for interesting data and prediction changes. If certain tolerances or thresholds are broken, in-app notifications will alert specified users of the change.

What-If

Running prescriptive What-If analysis is a key feature to all users. Further enhancements have been made to enhance its usability in this release.

Jobs

What-If analysis on the Grid has been moved to an asynchronous job allowing users to continue performing different analysis while the What-If results are being calculated. The mechanics of this new behavior follow the same pattern as Sensitivity, Matrix, and Scenario for a more streamlined user experience. 

Enhanced Derived What-If

Many variables are independent, especially aggregate variables. Further enhancements have been made to allow for more complicated aggregation methods to be constructed to better model this independent behavior.

Improved What-If Warnings

Warnings on What-Ifs have been made more visible to make users more aware in the event that they are conducting a What-If that is likely not plausible based upon historical data.

Scenario

A new module that enables your institution to predict what would happen if multiple strategies were enacted, such as overhauling a financial aid strategy while also being more effective with marketing or recruitment activities. This feature builds on Othot’s industry-leading prescriptive analytics capabilities to enable institutions to predict outcomes for virtually infinite situations before taking on any actual risks.

Scenario builder

Any completed What-If or Matrix can be applied and stacked to show the predicted outcome if each of the selected tactics were applied.

Individual results

Similar to a What-If, the What-If Score and Delta columns will appear for every record in the Grid of the Analyze page for a completed Scenario. See which students are predicted to be the most positively and negatively impacted by your potential decisions, including if a Matrix was adopted and applied.

Aggregate results

Also similar to a What-If, the overall predicted impact will be shown in the Prediction Overview area of the Analyze page.

Analyze

As the most heavily used area within the Othot platform, current enhancements and usability improvements are made to this area in each release. Below is a long list of the latest improvements.

Redesigned Prediction Overview Section

The concept of “Forecast” and “Current” predictions was confusing to many users. We listened to your feedback and redesigned this section to provide a more easily understandable display of your overall predictions. There are five different numbers intended to provide an understanding of the total prediction.

• Record Count
  Displays the number of records currently being viewed in the Grid.
• Historical Prediction
  The total prediction of the records in the Grid using your institution’s historical yield rate. 
• Current Prediction
  The total prediction of the records in the Grid based upon all data available to date.
• Descriptive Impact
  The total predicted impact from all variables that are not used in What-If analysis, such as demographics, geographic information, academic quality, and many, many more.
• Prescriptive Impact
  The total predicted impact from the current values of all What-If variables, such as total institutional aid offered, visits, and marketing or recruitment efforts. 

Current Prediction =
Historical Prediction + Descriptive Impact + Prescriptive Impact

Two additional rows will appear in the Prediction Overview section whenever What-If or Scenario results are being viewed in order to provide an understanding of their impacts.

• What-If Impact
  The total predicted impact from the changed What-If variables from the Current Prediction.
• What-If Prediction
  The total prediction of the records in the Grid with the What-If applied to each record.

What-If Prediction =
Current Prediction + What-If Impact

Waterfall Impact Visualization

A more detailed visual representation of the Historical Prediction, Current Prediction, Descriptive Impact, and Prescriptive Impact is provided in the carousel of aggregate visualizations. A waterfall style chart displays how much each Descriptive and Prescriptive variable impacts the Historical Prediction resulting in the Current Prediction. This visualization is very helpful when trying to understand what is driving predictions of populations and to what degree.

Corrected Impact Visuals

Aggregate visualizations in the carousel have been updated to include adjusted aggregate values, like aggregate predictions.

Impact Grid Filter

For variables that have an impact on predictions, an additional type called Impact has been added to the filter selector. The new type works just like the Conditional type of filter, but instead of applying the settings to the variable value, it applies them to the percent Impact that variable has on the prediction.

Easy Column Removal

Removing columns from the Analyze page can now be accomplished much more quickly by clicking the “X” icon in the column header.

Jump to Page Number

Added the ability to navigate to a specific page in the Grid on the Analyze page as a faster way to skip records than repeatedly clicking the page forward or back buttons.

Impactful What-If Value & Impact

The most impactful variable on the Grid can now be accompanied with the Value and Impact to each record’s prediction. From these additional variables, a user can understand the action and what the impact is of the most impactful What-If without running a What-If. 

Dashboard 

Your Dashboard now has more information than ever before. With dozens of new widgets and chart types, you and your team will easily have the data and visualizations you need to quickly analyze trends and predictions for decision making.

Radar & Waterfall Widget types

Two new widget types are available in Dashboards. They will be used to understand the impact of different variables on predictions (Waterfall) and compare the state of complex dependent targets, like annual goals (Radar). 

Improved Dashboard Export

Display enhancements have been made to increase the readability and usability of Dashboards outside of the Othot platform.

New Widgets

There are now approximately 35 to 40 widgets that are available to all Othot partner users, up from the previously available 7 to 10 widgets. Since all widgets are available to each institution, you may receive a message if data is required that is not currently provided to Othot. If you believe you’ve received that message in error or if you would like to provide the necessary data to Othot, please contact our Support team.

New Dashboards

The standard default “Overview” Dashboard has been replaced by two new area-specific Dashboards that are available by default to all users. 

• Enrollment
  • Total Predicted Enrollment
  • Average Academic Quality
  • Waterfall – Current YoY
  • Application Count to Date
  • Deposit Count to Date
  • Conversion Trends
• Financial Aid
  • Net Tuition Revenue & Discount Rate
  • Aid Offered and Disbursed
  • Count of Total Institutional Aid Offers by Year
  • Predicted Enrollment by Institutional Aid Offered by Year

Matrix

Othot’s feature for creating optimized financial aid strategies has received minor updates to improve the user experience and build on existing functionality based on user feedback.

Background Update

Updating edited decision values in a completed Matrix will now happen behind the scenes, replacing the loading visualization that remained until the update was finished. Users can now leave the Matrix page while updates are in progress and return whenever they’ve completed.

Cell Based Matrix Constraints

Added functionality to force the output of a Matrix to have specific decision values in any cell. This enables Matrix outputs to account for necessary rules that an institution may have as part of their financial aid strategy.

Census Data Update

Third party census data has been updated with 2017 American Community Survey estimated updates. 

Data Science Enhancements

State of the art Data Science is the primary driver of user value, as so, enhancements are constantly and consistently made to increase capabilities. 

New Recommendation Engine

Multiclass classification allows for the selection of the best outcome for each record out of a list of possibilities rather than just predicting how likely a single outcome is.

New Local Outlier Factor Algorithm

Data validity is important for producing performant predictions. Identifying “odd” or suspect data systemically is required to provide confidence in the data being used. This new algorithm will make data validation even more robust.

Deprecated Features

As the Othot platform matures, we constantly assess usage and value being provided to our users by each piece of functionality. In some cases, features get superseded by improved functionality or we realize the perceived value doesn’t pan out. In those cases, we look to remove these non-essential features periodically. In this release, we will be deprecating. 

Optimize

Matrix is a replacement for this functionality which is more intuitive to use and provides more value to existing users.

Top Impacts Visual

Waterfall is a replacement for this functionality which shows similar information in a more understandable visual representation.

Other Enhancements

As with every release, many existing features have been improved or expanded. A few of the more notable items are:

• Operations management console
• New scheduler service
• Auto accept train options
• Improved clean file operations & notifications
• Train years per phase option
• Multi-factor authentication & other enhanced security
• Enhanced audit log tracking
• Improved dynamic node functions
• Snapshot data collection
• Memory and run time improvements in large files merges
• Added font customization options
• Improved census functions
• Improved performance & scale
• Improved integration features through follow-on jobs, cross predict, & changed only export

Next Release

The Othot development team has already begun working on the next release, 3.1. This release is scheduled to go into production in Q1 2020. For more details about the features planned for the 3.1 release, contact Othot Customer Success or Othot Sales.