Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to change industries across the board, yet few organizations are able to capture its value and realize a real return-on-investment. The reality is that the transition to AI and data driven analysis is difficult and not well understood. The issue is twofold, first, the necessary technology to complete such a task has only recently become mainstream, and second, most data scientists are inexperienced in their respective industries. However, with all the uncertainty surrounding this topic, one hedge fund has managed to navigate through these challenges and accomplish what many companies are failing to do: building a high-performing data science team that achieves real return-on-investment (ROI).

Data Science is an amazing field of research that is under active development both from the academia and the industry. One of the saddest facts in the real-world is that most data science projects in organizations fail. Here I’ll present a new iteration of an agile framework called Business Science Problem Framework (Download PDF here) to implement data science in a way that enables decision making to follow a systematic process that connects the models you create to Return On Investment (ROI) and show the value that your improvements bring to the business. The end result is that the BSPF is an agile framework, and we are working to develop a new visualization (BSPF 2.0) that conveys this agility.

Model interpretability is critical to businesses. If you want to use high performance models (GLM, RF, GBM, Deep Learning, H2O, Keras, xgboost, etc), you need to learn how to explain them. With machine learning interpretability growing in importance, several R packages designed to provide this capability are gaining in popularity. We analyze the IML package in this article.

Real world data science - Learn how to compete in a Kaggle Competition using Machine Learning with R.

Interpret machine learning algorithms with R to explain why one prediction is made over another.

The goal is simple: to educate and empower future data scientists so they can help organizations gain data-driven results. This is why it was a no-brainer when the opportunity came up for Business Science to partner with Method Data Science, the go-to data science accelerator for aspiring data scientists. Now Method Data Scientists will get exclusive lectures from Business Science Instructors and have discounted access to Business Science University, the revolutionary online education platform for learning data science for business, along with instructor trainings as part of the Method Data Science accelerator program. This is big news for current and future data scientists seeking to gain real-world experience while learning how to deliver results to organizations!

I’m pleased to announce that we released brand new content for our flagship course, Data Science For Business (DS4B 201). Over the course of 10 weeks, the DS4B 201 course teaches students and end-to-end data science project solving Employee Churn with R, H2O, & LIME. The latest content is focused on transitioning from modeling Employee Churn with H2O and LIME to evaluating our binary classification model using Return-On-Investment (ROI), thus delivering business value. We do this through application of a special tool called the Expected Value Framework. Let’s learn about the new course content available now in DS4B 201, Chapter 7, which covers the Expected Value Framework for modeling churn with H2O!

The Expected Value Framework connects the machine learning model to ROI. In data science for business, it is critical to quantify the ROI of data science.

KERAS LSTM deep learning time series analysis. Use the NASA sunspots data set to predict sunspots ten years into the future with an KERAS LSTM deep learning model.

Predict employee churn with H2O machine learning and LIME. Use LIME (local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) for model explanation in data science for business.

Data Scientists want to run successful projects. However, the sad fact is that most data science projects in organizations fail. It’s not because of lack of skill or knowledge. Data science projects need a clear and effective plan of attack to be successful. As data scientists, we study a wide array of tools: advanced algorithms, knowledge of statistics, and even programming skills.

Information Security (InfoSec) is critical to a business. For those new to InfoSec, it is the state of being protected against the unauthorized use of information, especially electronic data. A single malicious threat can cause massive damage to a firm, large or small. It’s this reason when I (Matt Dancho) saw Russ McRee’s article, “Anomaly Detection & Threat Hunting with Anomalize”, that I asked him to repost on the Business Science blog. In his article, Russ speaks to use of our new R package, anomalize, as a way to detect threats (aka “threat hunting”). Russ is Group Program Manager of the Blue Team (the internal security team that defends against real attackers) for Microsoft’s Windows and Devices Group (WDG), now part of the Cloud and AI (C+AI) organization. He writes toolsmith, a monthly column for information security practitioners, and has written for other publications including Information Security, (IN)SECURE, SysAdmin, and Linux Magazine. The data Russ routinely deals with is massive in scale: He processes security event telemetry of all types (operating systems, network, applications, service layer) for all of Windows, Xbox, the Universal Store (transactions/purchases), and a few others. Billions of events in short order.