Analytics in Practice

Finally… the how of Session 4

analytics Ramsu Sundararajan

!1
 Bio

❖ Data scientist since 2003

❖ Head, Product R&D (solus.ai) and AI at Cartesian
Consulting
❖ Principal Scientist at Sabre Airline Solutions
❖ Rookie →
! Senior Scientist at GE Global Research
❖ Fellow, IIMC; M.Sc. [Tech], BITS Pilani

!2
What we will cover in this module

Learning from data: Basic concepts and taxonomy

How to apply analytics to a business use case

Why is everyone getting all worked up about AI?

!3
What can you do
with data?

!4
Pie charts are evil, okay? E.V.I.L.

Describe
❖ Business intelligence systems - charts,
dashboards etc.
❖ A lot of what you’ll end up doing in
Excel, for did in the DI section to get in
here
❖ Often used as a basic predictive model
❖ Statistical tests to qualify findings

Source: Sandeep Mittal, Ground Control Toons

!5
 Source: Sandeep Mittal, Ground Control Toons

So… wassup?

❖ Pattern discovery

Discover Performance monitoring

❖

❖ Anomaly detection

!6
 Source: Pinterest

Dude! How the $@&%# did this happen?

❖ Root cause analysis
❖ Can be used to drive process

Diagnose ❖
change (e.g. failure demand)
Can be a precursor to early
warning systems
❖ Explainability is key!

!7
 Source: Chicago Tribune
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future!” — Neils Bohr

Essential for decision

Predict
❖

making at scale in changing

environments

!8
 Source: YouTube (a clip from The Godfather)

What can I do, Godfather? What can I DO?

Formal decision making

Make decisions
❖

approaches
❖ Prognostics

!9
 Some basic principles
❖ Nearly everything we know, we learnt from data (or from someone
who did).
❖ The more data we have, the better we learn.
❖ Learning is different from memorisation.
❖ “Modify the theory to fit the facts (sic).” - Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study
in Scarlet
❖ “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” -
Albert Einstein
❖ Complexity has to be paid for, and accepts only two currencies: data
and domain knowledge

!10
 Copyright: Mark Stivers

Learning from data What are the various ways of

learning things from data?

!11
 Supervised learning
LEARNING FROM LABELED DATA

• Classification
• Loan default
• Campaign response
• Machine failure
• …
• Regression
• Sales/demand
• Stock price
• …

Labels aren’t always easily available. However, this is what is best explored algorithmically

!12
 Unsupervised learning
LEARNING FROM UNLABELLED DATA

• Segmentation
• Market basket analysis
• Dimensionality reduction
• Autoencoders
• Topic modeling
• Anomaly detection
• Pattern discovery

There are a lot more unsupervised learning problems out there than you think!

!13
Reinforcement learning
Learning by doing

• Price testing
• Page layouts
• Ad serving
• Yield management
• Game playing
• Contact governance
• …

This is gaining traction in a number of fields!

!14
Are recommender systems an example of

Supervised learning

Unsupervised learning

Reinforcement learning

!15
 Source: scikit-learn

Scikit-learn centric, but useful

Here’s one way to look at it nonetheless

!16
 Source: SAS

And another
!17
Model building in practice

What to ask while

building models
“Essentially, all models are wrong. But some are
useful.”
— George E. P. Box

Source: Wikipedia
!18
 Data gathering
❖ What data do we need to solve this problem? Do we have it?
❖ How big is it? (remember Goldilocks)
“Oh, we have a lot of data!”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
❖ How clean is it?
❖ How relevant is it?
❖ For supervised learning problems: Is it labeled? If not, what
will it take to get labels?

!19
 To be covered in Session 5
❖ Data cleaning
❖ Model building and interpretation
❖ Performance evaluation
❖ Deployment
❖ Decision making, and a brief taxonomy of approaches thereof
❖ Monitoring and updation
❖ AI: Why is this now a thing?

!20
Thank you!

!21