Watch the recording of Chief Data Scientist Melinda Han William’s presentation from the 2019 Strata Data Conference

You’ll learn

  • Discover a new path to unparalleled consumer understanding based on fine-grained digital behavior using neural networks and unsupervised learning
  • Learn a novel approach to clustering in a sparse, high-dimensional feature space using semantic embeddings
  • Explore a three-dimensional visual mapping of the internet and the consumer’s digital pathways


Brands, marketers, and product designers need to understand their customers. Traditionally, market research was driven by surveys and focus groups of limited scale. Today, digital signals like web browsing behavior can provide a stream of observed behavioral data that is rich with information about a user’s interests, needs, and preferences. This type of data, coupled with machine learning techniques, holds the promise of freeing market research from the constraints of self-reported customer data.

In its raw state, web browsing data is both too detailed and too sparse to be comprehensible, let alone actionable. Melinda Han Williams explores semantic embeddings as a novel approach for understanding observed digital consumer behavior and details how to use a semantic embedding of web browsing behavior to drive unsupervised clustering for customer segmentation. You’ll learn how Dstillery has trained a neural network on 15 billion behavioral interactions. The resulting model can be seen as a much lower dimensional embedding of the internet and, if projected into two or three dimensions, as an interactive map. This taxonomy of internet behavior can be used as the foundation for a number of applications, providing unparalleled insights into consumer behavior and needs.