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Data Science Trend Forecast: 2020

Data Science Trend Forecast: 2020

Taking into consideration the positive trends of Data Science from previous years, there lies an immense well of possibilities that awaits us in the future, that is, the upcoming year 2020. Some of these Data Science Trend Forecast for 2020 can be foreseen as follows:

  • Augmented Analysis

Complicated code and extensions will no longer be required to get deep insights from data. The augmented analysis helps layman users/analysts (in machine learning/data science) to make use of AI to analyze data. This will change the way data is consumed, created and shared across all data-intensive fields. Already several BI and analytics tools are trying to implement AI assistance full force in their platforms.

  • Continuous/ Real-time Intelligence

There is intensive activity ongoing every second in real-time platforms. If through some method, one can plug into this data, real-time user experience can be enhanced manifold. Continuous or real-time intelligence aims to do just that by analyzing data in real-time so that instant results can be provided to the user while he is still surfing the platform. It can also help increase profit margins by re-aligning the platform as per the observed interaction of the user.

  • NLP

Natural Language Processing is a very important segment of Artificial Intelligence since most real-world data are in text or voice format. To process such data, advanced NLP techniques are required which are being innovated with each passing data. Today, we can read, understand, classify and even create unique text documents with the help of machines. Further developments like intelligent summarization, entity recognition and task management using text input and much more are expected to happen, owing to the intense research and increasing data-science experts choosing NLP specialisation.

  • Conversational technology

There has already been a visible surge in the performance of voice assistants in 2019. In 2020, it is expected to further improve such that the conversational systems become more sensitive to the human language and also more humane in their response. By more humane, it will mean that the systems can keep track of previous responses and questions (which is not a very developed feature in any voice assistant in the market to this day). Also, most client interactions are expected to be taken over by conversational technology, thus, increasing response rate and efficiency.

  • Explainable AI

The last decade has seen massive growth in AI aided decisions for sure, but it has been a persistent problem to be able to explain these decisions or why the AI wants to go a certain way instead of another. Recently, however, a lot of research has increased the scope of explainable AI. 2020 can further be invested in understanding problems like say, how and why a certain neural network arrived at a certain decision. This will indefinitely increase the faith of clients on adolescent technology.

  • Persistent memory/ In-memory computation

In-memory computing or IMC can deliver extremely high-performance tasks due to optimized memory architecture. It also has become more feasible due to the decreasing expense of memory which owes credit to constantly emerging innovations.

  • Data Fabric

Data Fabric helps in the smooth access and sharing of data in distributed environments. It is usually custom made and helps in the transfer and store of data, data pipelines, APIs and previously used data services that have a chance of being re-invoked. Trusted and efficient data fabric can help to catalyze data science pipelines and reduce delays in customer-client interaction/iterations.

  • Advances in Quantum Computing

The research in Quantum Computing has a very high momentum at the moment. Even though the whole architecture of Quantum computing is at a very basic stage, increased investments and research are helping the field to grow by inches every passing day. A quantum computer is said to perform calculations which will take general computers a few years, in just a few seconds! As remarkable as it sounds, it can bestow superpowers to mankind! Imagine munching on years and years of historical data to arrive at conclusions about the future in just a few seconds. A whole lot of astonishing things await us, and we must be blessed to be a part of this century.

It is expected that India’s job openings in the analytics sector will double to about 200000 or two lakh jobs in 2020. Here is what 2020 for job seekers in data science will look like:

  • Fields like finance, IT, professional services and insurance will see a boom in demand for data science and analytics.
  • Having analytics skills like MapReduce, Apache Pig, Machine learning and Hadoop can provide an edge over other competitors in the field. The most fundamental in-demand skills will be Python and Machine Learning. Statistics is an added advantage.
  • Vacancies for roles like data developers, data engineers and data scientists will go over 700,000 by 2020.
  • The most promising sectors that will tend to create increasing opportunities include Aviation, Agriculture, Security, Healthcare and Automation.
  • The average salaries in India in development roles like Data Scientist or Data Engineer will range from 5 to 8 Lakh per annum.
  • The average salaries in India in management/strategizing roles like data architect or business intelligence manager will range from 10 to 20 Lakh per annum.

As exciting as all of it sounds, there is always a bag of unforeseen advancements that are bound to take us all by surprise, as has always happened with Data Science and AI in the past. So, hold tight for yet another mind-boggling ride through the lanes of technology this 2020!

Best of 2019 Trends in Data Science

Best of 2019 Trends in Data Science

Data Science has seen a massive boom in the past few years. It has also been claimed that it is indefinitely one of the fastest-growing fields in the IT/academic sector. One of the most hyped Trends in Data Science this year was that the sector saw a major hike in jobs as compared to the past years!

Such an unprecedented growth owes all its dues to the unimaginable benefits that artificial intelligence has brought to the plate of mankind for the very first time. It was never before imagined that external machines could aid us with such sophistication as is present today. Owing to this, it is imperative that an individual, irrespective of his/her calling, must have at least a superficial knowledge about the past advances and future possibilities of this field of study. Even if it is the job of scientists and engineers to figure out solutions using machine learning and data science, the solutions, undoubtedly is bound to affect all our lives in the upcoming years. Moreover, if you are planning to plug into the huge well of job openings in data science, exploring the past and upcoming trends in this field will surely take you a step ahead.

Looking back on the achievements of the year 2019, there is much which has happened. Here is a brief glimpse of what Trends in Data Science of 2019 looked like:

  • Accessible AI

The once-popular belief that AI technology was only meant for high-scale and high-tech industries, is now an old wives’ tale. AI has spread so rapidly across every phase of our lives, that sometimes we do not even realize that we are being aided by AI. For instance, recommendations that we get on online forums are something we have become very used to in recent times. However, very few have the conscious knowledge that the recommendations are regulated by AI technology. There are also several instances where a layman can use AI to get optimized outputs, like in automated machine learning pipelines. We even have improvised AI-aided security systems, music systems and voice assistants in our very homes! Overall, the impact of AI in everyday lives saw a massive boost in 2019, and it is only bound to increase.

  • The rapid growth of IoT products

As was already forecasted, the number of machines/devices which came online in 2019 was immense. Billions were invested in research to back the uprising IoT industry. Today it is nothing out of the ordinary to control home appliances like television and air conditioners with our smartphones or lock our and unlock our cars from even the opposite end of the globe. Bringing devices online not only makes the user experience far smoother but also generates crucial data for analysis. With such data, several unopened gates can be explored across several domains. The investments and count of IoT devices are expected to go up at an increasing rate in the upcoming years.

  • Evolution of Predictive Analysis

The concept of predictive analysis is to use past data to learn recurring patterns, such that it can predict outcomes of future events based on the patterns learnt. Today, with increasing data it becomes extensively important to make use of optimized predictive solutions. Big data comes into picture here and significant advancements have been made in 2019 about it. Tools like PySpark and MLLib have helped scale simple predictive solutions to extensive data.

  • Migration of Dark Data

Dark data is very old data which has probably been sitting in obsolete archives like old systems or even files in storage rooms! There is a general understanding that such unexplored data can show us the way to crucial insights about past trends which can help grab useful opportunities and even avoid unwanted loopholes. Therefore, there has been visible initiatives to make dark data more available to present-day systems with the help of efficient storage and migration tools.

  • Implementation of Regulations

In 2018, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) brought in a few data governance rules to emphasize the importance of data governance. The rules were laid down so fast that even at the year-end, several companies dealing with data are still trying to comply wholly with all the principles laid down. These principles have not only created a standard for data consumption and data handling domains but are also bound to shape the future of data handling with great impact.

  • DataOps

DataOps is an initiative to bring in some order in the way the data science pipeline functions. It is essentially a reflection of agile and DevOps methods in the field of data science. In 2019, it has been one of the major concerns of management in data science to integrate DataOps into their respective teams. Previously, such integration was not possible since the generic pipeline was still in making or under research. However, now, with a more robust structure, integrating DataOps can mean wonders for data science teams.

  • Edge Computing

As stated by Gartner, Inc. cloud computing and edge computing has evolved to become a complementary model in 2019. Edge computing goes by the concept of “more the proximity (or closeness to the source of computation), better is the efficiency”. Edge computing allows workloads to be located closer to the consumers and thus, reduces latency several-fold.

There is, however, a huge recurring gap when it comes to the need and availability of skilled people who can launch and contribute to these developments significantly. India contributed to 6% of job openings worldwide in 2019, which scales to around 97000 jobs!

The job trends of 2019 looked as follows:

  • BFSI sector had a massive demand for analytics professionals, followed by the e-commerce and telecom sectors. The banking and financial sectors continued to have high demand throughout.
  • Python served as a great skill to attract employers to skilled job seekers
  • A 2% increase in jobs offering over 15 Lakh per annum was observed
  • Also, 21% of jobs demanded young talent in data science, a great contrast to all previous years. 70% of job openings were for professionals with less than 5 years of experience.
  • The top in-demand designations were Analytics Manager, Business Analyst, Research Analyst, Data Analyst, SAS Analyst, Analytics Consultants, Statistical Analyst and Hadoop Developer
  • Big data skills like Hadoop and Spark were extremely in demand due to the growing rate of data.
  • Telecom industry saw a fall in demand for data science professionals.
  • The median salary of analytics jobs was just over 11 Lakh per annum.

On to 2020 now!

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Top 5 Careers in Data Science You Need to Know About

Top 5 Careers in Data Science You Need to Know About

 

Reports suggest that around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every single day. As the online usage growth increases at a tremendous rate, there is a need for immediate Data Science professionals who can clean the data, obtain insights from it, visualize it, train model and eventually come up with solutions using Big data for the betterment of the world.

By 2020, experts predict that there will be more than 2.7 million data science and analytics jobs openings. Having a glimpse of the entire Data Science pipeline, it is definitely tiresome for a single human to perform and at the same time excel at all the levels. Hence, Data Science has a plethora of career options that require a spectrum set of skill sets.

Let us explore the top 5 data science career options in 2019 (In no particular order).

 

1. Data Scientist

Data Scientist is one of the ‘high demand’ job roles. The day to day responsibilities involves the examination of big data. As a result of the analysis of the big data, they also actively perform data cleaning and organize the big data. They are well aware of the machine learning algorithms and understand when to use the appropriate algorithm. During the due course of data analysis and the outcome of machine learning models, patterns are identified in order to solve the business statement.

The reason why this role is so crucial in any organisation is that the company tends to take business decisions with the help of the insights discovered by the Data Scientist to have an edge over the company’s competitors. It is to be noted that the Data Scientist role is inclined more towards the technical domain. As the role demands a wide range of skill set, Data Scientists are one among the highest paid jobs.

 

Core Skills of a Data Scientist

  1. Communication
  2. Business Awareness
  3. Database and querying
  4. Data warehousing solutions
  5. Data visualization
  6. Machine learning algorithms

 

2. Business Intelligence Developer

BI Developer is a job role inclined more towards the Non-Technical domain but has a fair share of Technical responsibilities as well (if required) as a part of their day to day responsibilities. BI developers are responsible for creating and implementing business policies as a result of the insights obtained from the Technical team.

Apart from being a policymaker involving the usage of dedicated (or custom) Business Intelligence analytics tools, they will also have a fair share of coding in order to explore the dataset, present the insights of the dataset in a non-verbal manner. They help in bridging the gap between the technical team that works with the deepest technical understanding and the clients that want the results in the most non-technical manner. They are expected to generate reports from the insights and make it ‘less technical’ for others in the organisation. It is noted that the BI Developers have a deep understanding of Business when compared to Data Scientist.

 

Core Skills of a Business Analytics Developer

  1. Business model analysis
  2. Data warehousing
  3. Design of business workflow
  4. Business Intelligence software integration

 

3. Machine Learning Engineer

Once the data is clean and ready for analysis, the machine learning engineers work on these big data to train a predictive model that predicts the target variable. These models are used to analyze the trends of the data in the future so that the organisation can take the right business decisions. As the dataset involved in a real-life scenario would involve a lot of dimensions, it is difficult for a human eye to interpret insights from it. This is one of the reasons for training machine learning algorithms as it easily deals with such complex dataset. These engineers carry out a number of tests and analyze the outcomes of the model.

The reason for conducting constant tests on the model using various samples is to test the accuracy of the developed model. Apart from the training models, they also perform exploratory data analysis sometimes in order to understand the dataset completely which will, in turn, help them in training better predictive models.

 

Core Skills of Machine Learning Engineers

  1. Machine Learning Algorithms
  2. Data Modelling and Evaluation
  3. Software Engineering

 

4. Data Engineer

The pipeline of any data-oriented company begins with the collection of big data from numerous sources. That’s where the data engineers operate in any given project. These engineers integrate data from various sources and optimize them according to the problem statement. The work usually involves writing queries on big data for easy and smooth accessibility. Their day to day responsibility is to provide a streamlined flow of big data from various distributed systems. Data engineering differs from the other data science careers as in, it is concentrated on the system and hardware that aids the company’s data analysis, rather than the analysis of data itself. They provide the organisation with efficient warehousing methods as well.

 

Core Skills of Data Engineer

  1. Database Knowledge
  2. Data Warehousing
  3. Machine Learning algorithm

 

5. Business Analyst

Business Analyst is one of the most essential roles in the Data Science field. These analysts are responsible for understanding the data and it’s related trend post the decision making about a particular product. They store a good amount of data about various domains of the organisation. These data are really important because if any product of the organisation fails, these analysts work on these big data to understand the reason behind the failure of the project. This type of analysis is vital for all the organisations as it makes them understand the loopholes in the company. The analysts not only backtrack the loophole and in turn provide solutions for the same making sure the organisation takes the right decision in the future. At times, the business analyst act as a bridge between the technical team and the rest of the working community.

 

Core skills of Business Analyst

  1. Business awareness
  2. Communication
  3. Process Modelling

 

Conclusion

The data science career options mentioned above are in no particular order. In my opinion, every career option in Data Science field works complimentary with one another. In any data-driven organization, regardless of the salary, every career role is important at the respective stages in a project.

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The Upcoming Revolution in Predictive Analytics (And Data Science)

The Upcoming Revolution in Predictive Analytics (And Data Science)

The Next Generation of Data Science

Quite literally, I am stunned.

I have just completed my survey of data (from articles, blogs, white papers, university websites, curated tech websites, and research papers all available online) about predictive analytics.

And I have a reason to believe that we are standing on the brink of a revolution that will transform everything we know about data science and predictive analytics.

But before we go there, you need to know: why the hype about predictive analytics? What is predictive analytics?

Let’s cover that first.

 Importance of Predictive Analytics

Black Samsung Tablet Computer

By PhotoMix Ltd

 

According to Wikipedia:

Predictive analytics is an area of statistics that deals with extracting information from data and using it to predict trends and behavior patterns. The enhancement of predictive web analytics calculates statistical probabilities of future events online. Predictive analytics statistical techniques include data modeling, machine learning, AI, deep learning algorithms and data mining.

Predictive analytics is why every business wants data scientists. Analytics is not just about answering questions, it is also about finding the right questions to answer. The applications for this field are many, nearly every human endeavor can be listed in the excerpt from Wikipedia that follows listing the applications of predictive analytics:

From Wikipedia:

Predictive analytics is used in actuarial science, marketing, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, travel, mobility, healthcare, child protection, pharmaceuticals, capacity planning, social networking, and a multitude of numerous other fields ranging from the military to online shopping websites, Internet of Things (IoT), and advertising.

In a very real sense, predictive analytics means applying data science models to given scenarios that forecast or generate a score of the likelihood of an event occurring. The data generated today is so voluminous that experts estimate that less than 1% is actually used for analysis, optimization, and prediction. In the case of Big Data, that estimate falls to 0.01% or less.

Common Example Use-Cases of Predictive Analytics

 

Components of Predictive Analytics

Components of Predictive Analytics

 

A skilled data scientist can utilize the prediction scores to optimize and improve the profit margin of a business or a company by a massive amount. For example:

  • If you buy a book for children on the Amazon website, the website identifies that you have an interest in that author and that genre and shows you more books similar to the one you just browsed or purchased.
  • YouTube also has a very similar algorithm behind its video suggestions when you view a particular video. The site identifies (or rather, the analytics algorithms running on the site identifies) more videos that you would enjoy watching based upon what you are watching now. In ML, this is called a recommender system.
  • Netflix is another famous example where recommender systems play a massive role in the suggestions for ‘shows you may like’ section, and the recommendations are well-known for their accuracy in most cases
  • Google AdWords (text ads at the top of every Google Search) that are displayed is another example of a machine learning algorithm whose usage can be classified under predictive analytics.
  • Departmental stores often optimize products so that common groups are easy to find. For example, the fresh fruits and vegetables would be close to the health foods supplements and diet control foods that weight-watchers commonly use. Coffee/tea/milk and biscuits/rusks make another possible grouping. You might think this is trivial, but department stores have recorded up to 20% increase in sales when such optimal grouping and placement was performed – again, through a form of analytics.
  • Bank loans and home loans are often approved with the credit scores of a customer. How is that calculated? An expert system of rules, classification, and extrapolation of existing patterns – you guessed it – using predictive analytics.
  • Allocating budgets in a company to maximize the total profit in the upcoming year is predictive analytics. This is simple at a startup, but imagine the situation in a company like Google, with thousands of departments and employees, all clamoring for funding. Predictive Analytics is the way to go in this case as well.
  • IoT (Internet of Things) smart devices are one of the most promising applications of predictive analytics. It will not be too long before the sensor data from aircraft parts use predictive analytics to tell its operators that it has a high likelihood of failure. Ditto for cars, refrigerators, military equipment, military infrastructure and aircraft, anything that uses IoT (which is nearly every embedded processing device available in the 21st century).
  • Fraud detection, malware detection, hacker intrusion detection, cryptocurrency hacking, and cryptocurrency theft are all ideal use cases for predictive analytics. In this case, the ML system detects anomalous behavior on an interface used by the hackers and cybercriminals to identify when a theft or a fraud is taking place, has taken place, or will take place in the future. Obviously, this is a dream come true for law enforcement agencies.

So now you know what predictive analytics is and what it can do. Now let’s come to the revolutionary new technology.

Meet Endor – The ‘Social Physics’ Phenomenon

 

Image result for endor image free to use

End-to-End Predictive Analytics Product – for non-tech users!

 

In a remarkable first, a research team at MIT, USA have created a new science called social physics, or sociophysics. Now, much about this field is deliberately kept highly confidential, because of its massive disruptive power as far as data science is concerned, especially predictive analytics. The only requirement of this science is that the system being modeled has to be a human-interaction based environment. To keep the discussion simple, we shall explain the entire system in points.

  • All systems in which human beings are involved follow scientific laws.
  • These laws have been identified, verified experimentally and derived scientifically.
  • Bylaws we mean equations, such as (just an example) Newton’s second law: F = m.a (Force equals mass times acceleration)
  • These equations establish laws of invariance – that are the same regardless of which human-interaction system is being modeled.
  • Hence the term social physics – like Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism or Newton’s theory of gravitation, these laws are a new discovery that are universal as long as the agents interacting in the system are humans.
  • The invariance and universality of these laws have two important consequences:
    1. The need for large amounts of data disappears – Because of the laws, many of the predictive capacities of the model can be obtained with a minimal amount of data. Hence small companies now have the power to use analytics that was mostly used by the FAMGA (Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple) set of companies since they were the only ones with the money to maintain Big Data warehouses and data lakes.
    2. There is no need for data cleaning. Since the model being used is canonical, it is independent of data problems like outliers, missing data, nonsense data, unavailable data, and data corruption. This is due to the orthogonality of the model ( a Knowledge Sphere) being constructed and the data available.
  • Performance is superior to deep learning, Google TensorFlow, Python, R, Julia, PyTorch, and scikit-learn. Consistently, the model has outscored the latter models in Kaggle competitions, without any data pre-processing or data preparation and cleansing!
  • Data being orthogonal to interpretation and manipulation means that encrypted data can be used as-is. There is no need to decrypt encrypted data to perform a data science task or experiment. This is significant because the independence of the model functioning even for encrypted data opens the door to blockchain technology and blockchain data to be used in standard data science tasks. Furthermore, this allows hashing techniques to be used to hide confidential data and perform the data mining task without any knowledge of what the data indicates.

Are You Serious?

Image result for OMG image

That’s a valid question given these claims! And that is why I recommend everyone who has the slightest or smallest interest in data science to visit and completely read and explore the following links:

  1. https://www.endor.com
  2. https://www.endor.com/white-paper
  3. http://socialphysics.media.mit.edu/
  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_physics

Now when I say completely read, I mean completely read. Visit every section and read every bit of text that is available on the three sites above. You will soon understand why this is such a revolutionary idea.

  1. https://ssir.org/book_reviews/entry/going_with_the_idea_flow#
  2. https://www.datanami.com/2014/05/21/social-physics-harnesses-big-data-predict-human-behavior/

These links above are articles about the social physics book and about the science of sociophysics in general.

For more details, please visit the following articles on Medium. These further document Endor.coin, a cryptocurrency built around the idea of sharing data with the public and getting paid for using the system and usage of your data. Preferably, read all, if busy, at least read Article No, 1.

  1. https://medium.com/endor/ama-session-with-prof-alex-sandy-pentland
  2. https://medium.com/endor/endor-token-distribution
  3. https://medium.com/endor/https-medium-com-endor-paradigm-shift-ai-predictive-analytics
  4. https://medium.com/endor/unleash-the-power-of-your-data

Operation of the Endor System

Upon every data set, the first action performed by the Endor Analytics Platform is clustering, also popularly known as automatic classification. Endor constructs what is known as a Knowledge Sphere, a canonical representation of the data set which can be constructed even with 10% of the data volume needed for the same project when deep learning was used.

Creation of the Knowledge Sphere takes 1-4 hours for a billion records dataset (which is pretty standard these days).

Now an explanation of the mathematics behind social physics is beyond our scope, but I will include the change in the data science process when the Endor platform was compared to a deep learning system built to solve the same problem the traditional way (with a 6-figure salary expert data scientist).

An edited excerpt from Link here

From Appendix A: Social Physics Explained, Section 3.1, pages 28-34 (some material not included):

Prediction Demonstration using the Endor System:

Data:
The data that was used in this example originated from a retail financial investment platform
and contained the entire investment transactions of members of an investment community.
The data was anonymized and made public for research purposes at MIT (the data can be
shared upon request).

 

Summary of the dataset:
– 7 days of data
– 3,719,023 rows
– 178,266 unique users

 

Automatic Clusters Extraction:
Upon first analysis of the data the Endor system detects and extracts “behavioral clusters” – groups of
users whose data dynamics violates the mathematical invariances of the Social Physics. These clusters
are based on all the columns of the data, but is limited only to the last 7 days – as this is the data that
was provided to the system as input.

 

Behavioural Clusters Summary

Number of clusters:268,218
Clusters sizes: 62 (Mean), 15 (Median), 52508 (Max), 5 (Min)
Clusters per user:164 (Mean), 118 (Median), 703 (Max), 2 (Min)
Users in clusters: 102,770 out of the 178,266 users
Records per user: 6 (Median), 33 (Mean): applies only to users in clusters

 

Prediction Queries
The following prediction queries were defined:
1. New users to become “whales”: users who joined in the last 2 weeks that will generate at least
$500 in commission in the next 90 days
2. Reducing activity : users who were active in the last week that will reduce activity by 50% in the
next 30 days (but will not churn, and will still continue trading)
3. Churn in “whales”: currently active “whales” (as defined by their activity during the last 90 days),
who were active in the past week, to become inactive for the next 30 days
4. Will trade in Apple share for the first time: users who had never invested in Apple share, and
would buy it for the first time in the coming 30 days

 

Knowledge Sphere Manifestation of Queries
It is again important to note that the definition of the search queries is completely orthogonal to the
extraction of behavioral clusters and the generation of the Knowledge Sphere, which was done
independently of the queries definition.

Therefore, it is interesting to analyze the manifestation of the queries in the clusters detected by the system: Do the clusters contain information that is relevant to the definition of the queries, despite the fact that:

1. The clusters were extracted in a fully automatic way, using no semantic information about the
data, and –

2. The queries were defined after the clusters were extracted, and did not affect this process.

This analysis is done by measuring the number of clusters that contain a very high concentration of
“samples”; In other words, by looking for clusters that contain “many more examples than statistically
expected”.

A high number of such clusters (provided that it is significantly higher than the amount
received when randomly sampling the same population) proves the ability of this process to extract
valuable relevant semantic insights in a fully automatic way.

 

Comparison to Google TensorFlow

In this section a comparison between prediction process of the Endor system and Google’s
TensorFlow is presented. It is important to note that TensorFlow, like any other Deep Learning library,
faces some difficulties when dealing with data similar to the one under discussion:

1. An extremely uneven distribution of the number of records per user requires some canonization
of the data, which in turn requires:

2. Some manual work, done by an individual who has at least some understanding of data
science.

3. Some understanding of the semantics of the data, that requires an investment of time, as
well as access to the owner or provider of the data

4. A single-class classification, using an extremely uneven distribution of positive vs. negative
samples, tends to lead to the overfitting of the results and require some non-trivial maneuvering.

This again necessitates the involvement of an expert in Deep Learning (unlike the Endor system
which can be used by Business, Product or Marketing experts, with no perquisites in Machine
Learning or Data Science).

 

Traditional Methods

An expert in Deep Learning spent 2 weeks crafting a solution that would be based
on TensorFlow and has sufficient expertise to be able to handle the data. The solution that was created
used the following auxiliary techniques:

1.Trimming the data sequence to 200 records per customer, and padding the streams for users
who have less than 200 records with neutral records.

2.Creating 200 training sets, each having 1,000 customers (50% known positive labels, 50%
unknown) and then using these training sets to train the model.

3.Using sequence classification (RNN with 128 LSTMs) with 2 output neurons (positive,
negative), with the overall result being the difference between the scores of the two.

Observations (all statistics available in the white paper – and it’s stunning)

1.Endor outperforms Tensor Flow in 3 out of 4 queries, and results in the same accuracy in the 4th
.
2.The superiority of Endor is increasingly evident as the task becomes “more difficult” – focusing on
the top-100 rather than the top-500.

3.There is a clear distinction between “less dynamic queries” (becoming a whale, churn, reduce
activity” – for which static signals should likely be easier to detect) than the “Who will trade in
Apple for the first time” query, which are (a) more dynamic, and (b) have a very low baseline, such
that for the latter, Endor is 10x times more accurate!

4.As previously mentioned – the Tensor Flow results illustrated here employ 2 weeks of manual
improvements done by a Deep Learning expert, whereas the Endor results are 100% automatic and the entire prediction process in Endor took 4 hours.

Clearly, the path going forward for predictive analytics and data science is Endor, Endor, and Endor again!

Predictions for the Future

Personally, one thing has me sold – the robustness of the Endor system to handle noise and missing data. Earlier, this was the biggest bane of the data scientist in most companies (when data engineers are not available). 90% of the time of a professional data scientist would go into data cleaning and data preprocessing since our ML models were acutely sensitive to noise. This is the first solution that has eliminated this ‘grunt’ level work from data science completely.

The second prediction: the Endor system works upon principles of human interaction dynamics. My intuition tells me that data collected at random has its own dynamical systems that appear clearly to experts in complexity theory. I am completely certain that just as this tool developed a prediction tool with human society dynamical laws, data collected in general has its own laws of invariance. And the first person to identify these laws and build another Endor-style platform on them will be at the top of the data science pyramid – the alpha unicorn.

Final prediction – democratizing data science means that now data scientists are not required to have six-figure salaries. The success of the Endor platform means that anyone can perform advanced data science without resorting to TensorFlow, Python, R, Anaconda, etc. This platform will completely disrupt the entire data science technological sector. The first people to master it and build upon it to formalize the rules of invariance in the case of general data dynamics will for sure make a killing.

It is an exciting time to be a data science researcher!

Data Science is a broad field and it would require quite a few things to learn to master all these skills.

Dimensionless has several resources to get started with.

To Learn Data Science, Get Data Science Training in Pune and Mumbai from Dimensionless Technologies.

To learn more about analytics, be sure to have a look at the following articles on this blog:

Machine Learning for Transactional Analytics

and

Text Analytics and its applications

Enjoy data science!

The Role of Data Curation in Big Data

The Role of Data Curation in Big Data

Introduction

Good data management practices are essential for ensuring that research data are of high quality, findable, accessible and have high validity. You can then share data ensuring their sustainability and accessibility in the long-term, for new research and policy or to replicate and validate existing research and policy. It is important that researchers extend these practices to their work with all types of data, be it big (large or complex) data or smaller, more ‘curatable’ datasets.

In this blog, we are going to understand about the data curation. Furthermore, we will be looking into many other advantages which data curation will bring to the big data table.

What is Data Curation?

Curation is the end-to-end process of creating good data through the identification and formation of resources with long-term value. In information technology, it refers mainly to the management of data throughout its lifecycle, from creation and initial storage to the time when it is archived for future research and analysis, or becomes obsolete and is deleted. The goal of data curation in the enterprise is twofold: to ensure compliance and that data can be retrieved for future research or reuse

Why Do You Need Data Curation?

Organizations invest heavily in big data analytics — $44 billion in 2014 alone, according to Gartner; yet, studies show that most organizations use only about 10% of their collected data, data that remains scattered in silos and varied sources across the organization. With data volumes growing exponentially, along with the increasing variety and heterogeneity of data sources, getting the data you need ready for analysis has become a costly and time-consuming process. Multiple data sets from different sources must first be catalogued and connected before they can be used by various analytics tools. Duplicate data and blank fields need to be eliminated, misspellings fixed, columns split or reshaped, and data need to be enriched with data from additional or third party sources to provide more context.

  • Effective Machine Learning

Machine Learning algorithms have made great strides towards understanding the consumer space. AI consisting of “neural networks” collaborate, and can use Deep Learning to recognize patterns. However, Humans need to intervene, at least initially, to direct algorithmic behavior towards effective learning. Curations are about where the humans can actually add their knowledge to what the machine has automated. This results in prepping for intelligent self-service processes, setting up organizations up for insights.

  • Dealing with Data Swamps

A Data Lake strategy allows users to easily access raw data, to consider multiple data attributes at once, and the flexibility to ask ambiguous business driven questions. But Data Lakes can end up Data Swamps where finding business value becomes like a quest to find the Holy Grail. Such Data swamps minus well be a Data graveyard. Well data curation here can save your data lakes from becoming the data yards

  • Ensuring Data Quality

Data Curators clean and undertake actions to ensure the long undertake actions to ensure the long-term preservation and retention of the authoritative nature of digital objects.

 

Steps in Data Curation

Data curation is the process of turning independently created data sources (structured and semi-structured data) into unified data sets ready for analytics, using domain experts to guide the process. It involves:

1. Identifying

One needs to identify different data sources of interest (whether from inside or outside the enterprise) before they start working on a problem statement. Identification of the dataset is as important a thing as solving a problem. Many people underestimate the value of data identification. But, when one does data identification the right way, one can save on a lot of time wastage which can happen while optimizing the solution of the problem

2. Cleaning

Once you have some data at hand, one needs to clean the data. The incoming data may have a lot of anomalies like spelling errors, missing values, improper entries etc. Most of the data is always dirty and you need to clean it before you can start working with it. Cleaning data is one of the most important tasks under data curation. There is almost 200% value addition once data is in the right format

3. Transforming

Data transformation is the process of converting data or information from one format to another, usually from the format of a source system into the required format of a new destination system. The usual process involves converting documents, but data conversions sometimes involve the conversion of a program from one computer language to another to enable the program to run on a different platform. The usual reason for this data migration is the adoption of a new system that’s totally different from the previous one. Data curation also takes care of the data transformation

The more data you need to curate for analytics and other business purposes, the more costly and complex curation becomes — mostly because humans (domain experts, or data owners) aren’t scalable. As such, most enterprises are “tearing their hair out” as they try to cope with data curation at scale.

Roles of a Data Curator

In practice, data curation is more concerned with maintaining and managing the metadata rather than the database itself and, to that end, a large part of the process of data curation revolves around ingesting metadata such as schema, table and column popularity, usage popularity, top joins/filters/queries. Data curators not only create, manage, and maintain data, but may also determine best practices for working with that data. They often present the data in a visual format such as a chart, dashboard or report.

Data curation starts with the “data set.” These data sets are the atoms of data curation. Determining which of these data sets are the most useful or relevant is the job of the data curator. Being able to present the data in an effective manner is also extremely important. While some rules of thumb and best practices apply, the data curator must make an educated decision about which data assets are appropriate to use.

It’s important to know the context of the data before it can be trusted. Data curation uses such arbiters of modern taste as lists, popularity rankings, annotations, relevance feeds, comments, articles and the upvoting or downvoting of data assets to determine their relevancy.

How to Start with Data Curation?

First, companies can inject additional data assessments into their reviews of data with end users that evaluate how data can be used or redirected. One way this can be done is by making data retention reviews a collaborative process across business functions. The collaboration enables users who ordinarily wouldn’t be exposed to some types of data to evaluate if there are ways that this data can be plugged in and used in their own departmental analytics processes.

Second, IT and the business should articulate rules governing data purges. Presently, there is a fear of discarding any data, no matter how useless.

Third, companies should consider adding a data curator, which is a librarian-like curation function, to their big data and analytics staffs.

Summary

Data sets are reusable components — anyone conducting analysis should share and expect data sets that they create to be re-used. Re-usability is key to self-service at scale. Companies such as GoDaddy and eBay have already embraced this approach to harvesting and distributing data for re-use, allowing any user to become a curator of data knowledge and resulting in higher productivity.

Data curation observes the use of data, focusing on how context, narrative, and meaning can be collected around a reusable data set. It creates trust in data by tracking the social network and social bonds between users of data. By employing lists, popularity rankings, annotations, relevance feeds, comments, articles and the upvoting or downvoting of data assets, curation takes organizations beyond data documentation to creating trust in data across the enterprise.

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