Agenda

We all know that feature creation is a crucial step in building predictive models. Many features can be automated easily such as z-scores, min-max normalization, log transforms, Box-Cox transforms.  Multi-dimensional features, such as interactions, are often game-changers for model accuracy. However, finding which interaction terms to include in models can be tedious, often achieved by trying combinations manually, trying all combinations, or hoping that the tree ensemble or neural network will find it on its own (hint: maybe, but they often do not). 

This session will describe how and why these features are critical for building accurate models and how one can streamline the process of building features without the costs of the combinatoric explosion we often battle when dealing with a high-dimensional data space. 

Organizations are often faced with analyzing large amounts of text documents – e.g., legislation, tax addenda, legal opinions, research papers, and grants. It is often highly time-consuming to manually investigate these documents even for individuals with high degree of expertise. There are traditional Natural Language Processing/Understanding (NLP/U) methods already in place to help expedite the analysis, but now there is a need to advance these methods. Recent advances in the field include the development of domain-specific (e.g., legal, medical) models to help interpret and analyze the text data. We’ll discuss industry use-cases demonstrating the advantages and application of domain-specific models aimed at analysis of recent legislature and its impacts across Government sectors, all developed on CortextAI for Government, Deloitte’s collection of AI solutions for specific mission challenges.

In this talk, we will explain the approach we took in modeling user growth in Twitter in the aftermath of the Pandemic. We took a structurally causal approach in modeling user growth, which has now helped us in producing explainable forecast for our topline user metric, in performing attributable analysis for teams focused on the top of the funnel, and in projecting the contribution of our causal improvements for the next few quarters.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become a main focus topic for retail organisations worldwide. What started in small R&D environments in the "big data" revolution a few years ago has now grown into a mature practice where data scientists and data engineers work together towards common business goals, such as demand and supply chain forecasting, customer recommendations, and fraud detection. This growth also comes with challenges; machine learning models cannot live on their own and have to be incorporated into production environments. To that end, programming frameworks, tools and infrastructure are evolving at an enormous pace. New architectures and design pattern have arrived to work with these new technologies. One important field of research is MLOps, which has evolved into a way of working and set of best practices to deploy, test, manage, and monitor machine learning models in production. In this session, we'll explore this relatively new subject. Bas will explain the need for MLOps, dive into the tools and techniques, and give some examples of real-world retail solutions.

Value chains have been evaluated for decades. In this era of digital transformation, understanding the Data Science Value Chain is critical, but seldom is it examined as a system, nor re its component parts subject to systematic study. In this session, it will be shown how ML exists as a component within the value chain along with data acquisition, cleansing, formatting and accessibility. A conceptual case study aggregated from several non-specific sources shows the path from good data to the benefits of ML over traditional methods such as Designed Experiments. An overview of the 4.0 culture is integrated for a broader view of the benefit of ML within the value chain. Digital transformation's effects on the value chain are also integrated within the 4.0 culture. This presentation will highlight the myth that "everything data belongs to IT" by showing management and non-IT professionals the need for more knowledge about the data science value chain and where they fit within its constructs. Proposing a collaborative activity among the non-IT parts of the organization and an analytics maturity model expands where and how ML benefits decision making throughout the organization. The collaborative process also enhances communication of ML results to assist management in seeing beyond IT as a sole resource.

Paychex is an American provider of human resource, payroll, and benefits outsourcing services for primarily small- to medium-sized businesses. We envision delivering curated, concise labor force analytics to ~700,000 customers representing tens of millions of workers. Although we have been successful in deploying analytics on-prem for 15 years, our existing systems have been unable to meet intensifying demand to serve larger numbers of users. We would like to harness cloud scalability while minimizing disruption to our work processes and security policies. Therefore, we are exploring a hybrid approach involving on-premises application hosting joined with cloud-based data engineering and model building. This talk describes advantages and tradeoffs we've experienced while migrating models to the Azure cloud. The elasticity of the cloud makes explainable AI achievable; we see up to 1,000-fold increase in computational speed. In addition, distributed processing has enabled us to overcome data issues and implement automated tests. Challenges have included networking infrastructure and access limitations. We've had to change ourselves to be cloud-ready, while the cloud has adapted to meet our requirements.

Identifying anomalous observations has important business impacts across all industries. None more than in the world of fraud detection where some observations are intentionally trying to hide, which is different than most rare event problems that exist in modeling. This talk will highlight some modern approaches to anomaly detection: local outlier factors, isolation forests, and classifier adjusted density estimation (CADE). All of these techniques have foundations in places that were not originally anomaly detection. This talk will highlight these approaches as well as demonstrate the approaches using open source software.

As more and more cloud providers develop and offer AI services, enterprises and s/w service providers are relying on integrating with them rather than building models themselves. Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft are leading in this regard.  In contact centers, there are multiple such offerings for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech (TTS) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Building a global contact center cloud solution using these 3rd party services is a challenge, as there no one vendor is mature and performs well across all geographies, languages and use cases. How do we offer customers the choice of vendors for their use case? How can we help customers consistently and continuously benchmark multiple services on a common set of criteria and choose the right product for their use case? We are building a universal harness that allows customers to mix-and-match vendors. In addition, we are building a benchmarking platform to help customers compare and test multiple vendors for the same use case. In the presentation, we will discuss the metrics, techniques, automation, and learnings for this benchmarking solution.