Is Machine Learning Right for Your Business? Posted on : Sep 25 - 2017

Machine learning (ML) is all the craze right now. You hear about Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg debate the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but you wonder, how is machine learning going to actually help my business? In this article, we briefly explain what ML is and then dive into the ML-related questions your company should be asking.

What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is revolutionary because it gives computers the ability to solve problems without being explicitly programmed. In a conventional computer algorithm, a programmer will specify the rules that explicitly determine what their software will do.

ML algorithms work differently. At a high level, they make decisions/predictions by ingesting large quantities of historical data and using that knowledge to guide their results. Some examples of ML currently being used in businesses include:

• Email filters marking messages as either spam or not spam
• Netflix recommending what movies/shows you are likely to enjoy
• Google maps predicting how difficult parking will be at your destination
• Facebook’s facial recognition identifying people in photos
• Anomaly detection algorithms that can identify fraudulent purchases

Here is the typical setup for doing machine learning (at a very high level):

1. Pick a ML model/algorithm
2. Train your model by feeding it data
3. Use the trained model to make decisions/predictions

Let’s use email spam filters as an example. The ML model an email provider might use to detect spam is the naive bayes classifier (but other applicable models exist as well). They train this model by feeding in millions of emails that are marked as spam and emails that are marked as legitimate. View More