Show HN: FactIQ – A Data Explorer for the US Economy
factiq.com
Live Demo: https://factiq.com/
Datasets: BLS, EIA, BTS, Census EITS, and more
What FactIQ is - data analysis tool for 7M+ economic data series
- meant for folks who need quick access to reliable economic statistics and contextual analysis
- emphasis on data traceability and citations
For reference, here is a quick FactIQ analysis that compares how sources of electricity in the US and China changed over time: https://www.factiq.com/share/7c0bf9a6d8304c01849af763f39362e...
Why we built it
- we worked on Defog.ai for 3 years, selling fine-tuned AI data analysts to large enterprises based on our open-source text to SQL models
- saw non-trivial usage and adoption, but it became more of a consulting company instead of a scalable product, because we needed to spend a lot of time gathering context and understanding DB schemas for each customer
- decided it was a better bet to build something which was widely useful and where we could design and control the database schema to make it more AI friendly
- saw how broken the current state of economic data discovery was, and decided to fix it
Technical Details - we get large data dumps from government agencies, standardize them into a common internal schema, use LLMs to extract metadata and enrich the data, and create embeddings to make it searchable
- when users ask questions, we do an embeddings-based search (to discover relevant data series) along with an agentic analysis pipeline for actually answering questions
What's next - More comprehensive data about the US economy
- Adding data for China, India, and the EU
What we're looking for - Ask complex questions, and give us feedback on what we can improve
- If you work regularly with economic data, tell us what your workflow needs are