By Swathi Ambati, HEXstream senior integrations consultant 

In today's data-driven world, maximizing the value of your data is key to staying competitive. Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI) provides powerful tools for companies to manage, analyze and leverage data. A crucial aspect of this process is data augmentation, i.e. the enrichment of existing data sets by adding relevant information, which can significantly improve data quality and insights. This technique is often used in analytics and machine learning to help companies gain deeper insights and make better decisions, which is what we’re all striving toward. 

What is data augmentation in Oracle FDI?

Data augmentation is the process of enriching an existing data set with additional external or synthesized information. This can help to fill in missing values, add context and ensure better accuracy and completeness so that your data is ultimately more reliable for analysis and decision-making. Data augmentation can improve the quality and depth of datasets, such as integrating external data, creating new features or using machine-learning models to fill in gaps.

Below are some practical examples of how data augmentation can be used to improve the value of datasets in Oracle FDI. Let's explore simple scenarios that illustrate the need for data augmentation:

1. External Data Integration

Scenario: You are analyzing sales data and want to understand how regional weather conditions affect sales performance.

Existing Data: You have sales-transaction data with fields like Transaction ID, Date, Product, Quantity, Sales Amount and Location.

Augmentation: You pull weather data (e.g., temperature, humidity) from an external API using the Location and Date columns as key identifiers.

Result: New columns such as Temperature and Weather Condition are added, which provide insights into how weather influences sales trends. This enriched data set can now reveal, for example, how sales for certain products increase during colder or warmer days.

2. Feature Engineering

Scenario: You want to predict customer churn based on purchase behavior.

Existing Data: You have customer-order history with columns like Customer ID, Order Date, Order Amount and Product Category.

Augmentation: A new feature called Average Order Frequency is created by calculating the time difference between consecutive orders for each customer.

Result: A new Average Order Frequency column is added to the dataset, enabling better predictions for customer churn based on the frequency of their purchases. This feature helps identify customers who are at risk of churning if their order frequency drops over time.

3. Data Enrichment with External Financial Data

Scenario: You need to add currency exchange rates to a financial report that involves international transactions.

Existing Data: Your data set contains columns like Transaction ID, Amount, Transaction Date and Currency.

Augmentation: You fetch historical exchange rates based on the Transaction Date and Currency from an external financial data source.

Result: The data set is enriched with a new Exchange Rate column, as well as a Converted Amount (USD) column for more uniform financial reporting. This allows for consistent reporting across multiple currencies, enhancing financial analysis.

Why does data augmentation matter in Oracle FDI?

Data augmentation is a powerful tool for organizations looking to enhance the quality and comprehensiveness of prebuilt datasets. The augmented data provides the extra context and reliability needed for more accurate insights and better decision-making. It can help reduce biases in models, fill gaps in datasets, and add external data sources that enrich the understanding of the underlying trends.

What’s next?

In this blog post we explored how data augmentation can be applied within Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI). Whether through external data integration, feature engineering, or synthetic data generation, augmenting your data can unlock new levels of insight and improve your analytics capabilities.

In the next post, we will dive deeper into how to implement data augmentation in FDI, exploring the specific tools and techniques available in Oracle Fusion to make this process seamless and effective.

HEXstream can help with your FDI implementation. Click here to contact us.