Category Archives: Problems

Decision Graphs

About eight years ago, I wrote a little blog post on dynamic decision trees. If you have the time, go back and read that and the follow up posts on the subject. If not, I’ll summarize. Instead of building a Rules Engine to make decisions, I built a dynamic traverser that evaluates logic on the fly. This enables us to change how the decisions are made any time. We can also version the trees as we change it and create completely new trees for any complex decision making. If we don’t have enough information to get to a conclusion, it doesn’t give up or make something up, instead it asks us a question we must answer to continue down the path.

I bring up this relic from the past because I’m still trying to wrap my head around the value of “Context Graphs”. Which are supposed to be graphs that capture the how, when and why decisions were made instead of what decision was made. The idea being to capture “decision traces” which then allow an AI agent to see precedents (how similar problems were solved) and apply those same rules to new situations. The first decision traces would be made by people, and then the agents could learn and take it from there. So every time you want a decision answered, your agents would read all the previous decisions, analyze them, and make a new decision. But why? If we made a policy change, would the AI agents now ignore all the previous decisions and utilize the new policy? Would we have to repopulate the graph with human made decisions following the new policy so the agent understood there was a change?

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Cleansing your Neo4j Aura

Last week I was helping out a user who was seeing lots of error messages in their application logs when connecting to Neo4j Aura. So I did like any good developer and I asked the all knowing all powerful google how to cleanse your Aura, and guess what it told me…

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Graphs and Pyramids

Question: Do you want to get Rich?
I’ll answer for you: “Yes!”

Follow along with this blog series and if it doesn’t make you rich, you can go back to your youtube videos, you can go back to watching Tiger King on Netflix, you can go back to your crappy life. Let’s continue.

Question: Are you poor? dumb? ugly? do you make bad decisions?
I’ll answer for you: “Yes!”.

If you were not poor, you would be on a yacht in Ibiza and not reading my blog. If you were not dumb you would be doing whatever it is smart people do, I wouldn’t know but I’m pretty sure it’s not reading my blog. If you were not ugly you would be in Paris or Milan murdering the runway instead of reading my blog. If you didn’t make bad decisions you wouldn’t have decided to read my blog which just made you feel sad about your life. See where I’m going with this?

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Building a Chat Bot in Neo4j Part 3

In part one, we learned to listen to our users, in part two we began learning how to talk back. Before we go any further in to the stored procedure, how about we build a little front end to show off the work we’ve done so far on this proof of concept? That will also make things easier to test out and let us get into the mindset of the user. There are a ton of options here, lots of folks like Spring and Spring Boot. Others are more hipsters and into Micronaut. I am even more of a hipster and prefer to use Jooby, but it doesn’t really matter. We’ll be using Cypher, the Neo4j Drivers and the Stored Procedures we build along the way so technically you can do this in just about any language.
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Building a Chat Bot in Neo4j Part 2

In part one our this building a chatbot series, we figured out how to use OpenNLP to “hear” what a user is saying and figure out both their intent and any entities they may have mentioned. Today we’re going to learn how to use Neo4j to talk back… like an impudent child.

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Building a Chat Bot in Neo4j

Last year eBay built a chatbot using Neo4j. Unfortunately we have grown so big I didn’t get a chance to work on that project and kinda feel left out. So I decided I’m going to build my own chatbot with Neo4j. As usual I’ve never done this before, have very little idea what I’m doing, have no team, and have barely any time to get this done. So with those disclaimers out of the way, let’s see what we can do.
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The Real Property Graph

Is not that thing above. That’s a Chart, not a Graph. But anyway…Neo4j is designed to support the property graph model natively. There are a host of other technologies that can bolt-on a “graph layer” of some kind. However it doesn’t make them a graph database. It’s like adding a rear spoiler to a van, sure it may look cool… or ridiculous, but it won’t make it a race car. Don’t fall for it. If you need fast graph queries, use a real graph database. But today we won’t talk about that. Instead we’re going to talk about the real property graph…
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Finding Fraud Part Two

In the last blog post, we saw how we can use Neo4j to find the merchants where credit card fraud originated or was used for testing stolen data in order to prevent further fraudulent charges. It stemmed from a webinar on our amazing youtube channel with has hundreds of videos about graphs and Neo4j. We will continue diving in to the technical details by looking at how Neo4j can help you find Fraud Rings. The way this fraud works is that a large set of synthetic accounts are created and act like normal customers. Over time they request higher and higher levels of credit which they pay back on time. Then they all request the maximum credit they can get, take out the money, and disappear! Let’s find them before this happens.

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Finding Fraud

It’s no secret that one of our hottest use cases lately has been Fraud Detection. A while back we did a webinar talking about some of the ways you could use Neo4j to fight fraud. Watch it, if you haven’t yet. Today I want to augment that webinar with some cypher queries. Let’s see how it works:
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Vendor Benchmarks

How does the saying go? There are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks. I’ve already made my feelings about database vendor benchmarks known, but in case you missed it. They are complete fabrications. Never to be trusted, never ever. Never. But vendors love to do benchmarks, they love spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt instead of spending their time doing productive things like creating useful content that teaches people how to use their product. I wish I could just ignore this nonsense and focus on what really matters, like helping our customers to successful production rollouts, but alas, here we are.

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