Automated industry classification with deep learning

Abstract

An automated predictive analytics system disclosed herein provides a novel technique for industry classification. Leveraging specific API to construct a database of companies labeled with the industries to which they belong, the automated predictive analytics system trains a deep neural network to predict the industries of novel companies. The automated predictive analytics system examines the capacity of the model to predict six-digit NAICS codes, as well as the ability of the model architecture to adapt to other industry segmentation schemas. Additionally, the automated predictive analytics system investigates the ability of the model to generalize despite the presence of noise in the labels in the training set. Finally, the automated predictive analytics system explores the possibility of increasing predictive precision by thresholding based on the confidence scores that the model outputs along with its predictions. The automated predictive analytics system finds that the approach yields six-digit NAICS code predictions that surpass the precision of gold-standard databases.