Week 1 Day 3

Machine Learning for Business Professionals

What is ML?

1. Standard Use Cases and Algorithms

 Think about a business. How do they use data today? Do they
have a dashboard that analysts view every day? Or maybe
there's a report that their manager's review each month, both
the dashboard and the report are examples of backward-
looking data.
 Most analytics in a business is probably backward-looking,
where they look at historical data to calculate metrics or
identify trends.
 To create value in your business, you need to use data to make
decisions. It is not enough to identify a trend. You need to
make decisions based on that trend.
 E.g.: A business analyst's reviews a report and sees that the
demand is increasing for a specific product in a specific region.
 The analysts then suggest a new price for that product in that
region to increase profit.
  Now, the business analyst is making a predictive insight, but is
that scalable? Can that business analysts make such a decision
for every product and every region? Can they dynamically
adjust the price every second based on how many people want
that item at that very instant?
 In order to make decisions around predictive insights
repeatable, we need machine learning.
 The key to making an ML model generalize is data and lots of it.
Having labeled data is a prerequisite for successful ML.

2. Characteristics of Data
 The main thing to know is that for machine learning, our
models will only be as good as our data is, and more often
than not, we need a lot of data.

 Machine learning is a tool that enables your business to

make many predictive decisions from data. It's about scaling
business intelligence and decision-making. Machine learning
uses standard algorithms.
  The first stage of ML is to train an ML model with examples.
An example consists of an input and the correct answer for
that input. This is called a label.

 After we train the model, we can use it to predict the label of

images that it has never seen before.
Getting Started with AWS Machine Learning
What is Machine Learning?
1. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence. It helps you
use historical data to make better business decisions.
2. Machine learning is also a process where machines take data,
analyze it to generate predictions, and use those predictions to
make decisions. Those predictions generate results, and those
results are used to improve future predictions.
3. Machine learning can make predictions from huge datasets. It can
also optimize utility functions and extract hidden patterns and
structures from those datasets by classifying data.

What can machine learning do?

Machine learning can be used for targeted marketing, matching
customers with offers they might like, choosing marketing campaigns,
and cross-selling or upselling items.

Machine learning can also be used to automate categorization of

documents such as matching hiring managers and resumes by learning
to understand written content.
Types of Machine Learning

In supervised learning, the inputs to the model including the example

outputs also known as labels, are known and the model learns to
generalize the outputs from these examples.
In unsupervised learning, the labels aren't known. The model finds
patterns in structure from the data without any help.
1. In classification, the output variable is a category like color, which
could be red, blue, or green, and it results in true or false for a
particular question.
2. In regression, the output variable is a number or a value like
weight, dollars, or temperature. In unsupervised learning, which is
also called self-organization, there's no teacher.
In unsupervised learning, the labels aren't known. The model finds
patterns in structure from the data without any help.