FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 2, 2015 – Ottawa, Canada: WiseWithData, leading experts in Apache Spark and legacy SAS analytics, has signed a multi-year agreement to provide passport demand forecasting to Passport Canada (IRCC). As part of the agreement, WiseWithData will provide its experts in time series forecasting. The goal is to build a fully reconciled hierarchical forecast models by channel, region, applicant age, product type and application type. Forecasting techniques explored will include Exponential Smoothing, ARIMAX and LSTM. The final models will be composed of over 1,000 individual sub-models. The team will leverage both existing legacy SAS technology as well as the modern Apache Spark platform.
These models will be critically important to improving the quality of the service that Passport Canada provides, and reducing the overall costs of Passport production. With highly accurate demand models, Passport Canada will be able to budget and staff more efficiently while still meeting its service level obligations.
Comments:
“We’re thrilled to be helping Passport Canada in its ongoing efforts to streamline their operations. While Passport Canada has successfully leveraged forecast methodologies in the past, we believe using modern technologies and our deep analytical expertise, we can improve upon the quality and level of detail of previous forecasts.”
Ian J. Ghent – President – WiseWithData
About WiseWithData
WiseWithData are leading experts in Apache Spark and legacy SAS based analytics. Our mission is to leverage the power of Apache Spark to Ignite Open Analytics for our customers. With deep knowledge of all aspects of business analytics, we are dedicated to helping customers get the most from their data assets. We offer consulting services for data warehousing, reporting and BI, forecasting, predictive modelling, natural language processing and simulation systems. We have deep domain experts in Fraud, Compliance, Anti-Money Laundering, and Security Intelligence solutions for the banking, government, healthcare and insurance sectors.
About Passport Canada (Citizenship & Immigration Canada)
Passport Canada is an independent operating agency of the Government of Canada, now part of Citizenship & Immigration Canada. Passport Canada is responsible for issuing, revoking, withholding, and recovering Canadian passports, and it was the sole issuer of them (except for emergency and temporary passports that may be issued by a Canadian mission abroad). Passport Canada is financed through the fees collected for issuing passports and other travel documents. With an annual budget of over $500M CAD, it does not receive direct funding from the federal government of Canada. In 2014/15 fiscal year, Passport Canada issued 5.7 Million Passports to Canadian Citizens.