The field of Artificial Intelligence powered by Machine Learning and Deep Learning has gone through some phenomenal changes over the last decade. Starting off as just a pure academic and research-oriented domain, we have seen widespread industry adoption across diverse domains including retail, technology, healthcare, science and many more. More than often, the standard toolbox of machine learning, statistical or deep learning models remain the same. New models do come into existence like Capsule Networks, but industry adoption of the same usually takes several years. Hence, in the industry, the main focus of data science or machine learning is more ‘applied’ rather than theoretical and effective application of these models on the right data to solve complex real-world problems is of paramount importance.

A machine learning or deep learning model by itself consists of an algorithm which tries to learn latent patterns and relationships from data without hard-coding fixed rules. Hence, explaining how a model works to the business always poses its own set of challenges. There are some domains in the industry especially in the world of finance like insurance or banking where data scientists often end up having to use more traditional machine learning models (linear or tree-based). The reason being that model interpretability is very important for the business to explain each and every decision being taken by the model.However, this often leads to a sacrifice in performance. This is where complex models like ensembles and neural networks typically give us better and more accurate performance (since true relationships are rarely linear in nature).We, however, end up being unable to have proper interpretations for model decisions.

To address and talk about these gaps, I will take a conceptual yet hands-on approach where we will explore some of these challenges in-depth about explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and human interpretable machine learning and even showcase with some examples using state-of-the-art model interpretation frameworks in Python!

Causal questions are ubiquitous in data science. For e.g. questions such as, did changing a feature in a website lead to more traffic or if digital ad exposure led to incremental purchase are deeply rooted in causality.

Randomized tests are considered to be the gold standard when it comes to getting to causal effects. However, experiments in many cases are unfeasible or unethical. In such cases one has to rely on observational (non-experimental) data to derive causal insights. The crucial difference between randomized experiments and observational data is that in the former, test subjects (e.g. customers) are randomly assigned a treatment (e.g. digital advertisement exposure). This helps curb the possibility that user response (e.g. clicking on a link in the ad and purchasing the product) across the two groups of treated and non-treated subjects is different owing to pre-existing differences in user characteristic (e.g. demographics, geo-location etc.). In essence, we can then attribute divergences observed post-treatment in key outcomes (e.g. purchase rate), as the causal impact of the treatment.

This treatment assignment mechanism that makes causal attribution possible via randomization is absent though when using observational data. Thankfully, there are scientific (statistical and beyond) techniques available to ensure that we are able to circumvent this shortcoming and get to causal reads.

The aim of this talk, will be to offer a practical overview of the above aspects of causal inference -which in turn as a discipline lies at the fascinating confluence of statistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology, economics, and medicine, among others. Topics include:

• The fundamental tenets of causality and measuring causal effects.
• Challenges involved in measuring causal effects in real world situations.
• Distinguishing between randomized and observational approaches to measuring the same.
• Provide an introduction to measuring causal effects using observational data using matching and its extension of propensity score based matching with a focus on the a) the intuition and statistics behind it b) Tips from the trenches, basis the speakers experience in these techniques and c) Practical limitations of such approaches
• Walk through an example of how matching was applied to get to causal insights regarding effectiveness of a digital product for a major retailer.
• Finally conclude with why understanding having a nuanced understanding of causality is all the more important in the big data era we are into.

In machine learning, hyperparameters are parameters that governs the training process itself. For example, learning rate, number of hidden layers, number of nodes per layer are typical hyperparameters for neural networks. Hyperparameter Tuning is the process of searching the best hyper parameters to initialize the learning algorithm, thus improving training performance.

We present Katib, a scalable and general hyper parameter tuning framework based on Kubernetes which is ML framework agnostic (Tensorflow, Pytorch, MXNet, XGboost etc). You will learn about Katib in Kubeflow, an open source ML toolkit for Kubernetes, as we demonstrate the advantages of hyperparameter optimization by running a sample classification problem. In addition, as we dive into the implementation details, you will learn how to contribute as we expand this platform to include autoML tools.

Context: The Search problem

GOJEK is a SuperApp: 19+ apps within an umbrella app. One of these is GO-FOOD, the first food delivery service in Indonesia and the largest food delivery service in Southeast Asia. There are over 300 thousand restaurants on the platform with a total of over 16 million dishes between them.

Over two-thirds of those who order food online using GO-FOOD do so by utilising text search. Search engines are so essential to our everyday digital experience that we don’t think twice when using them anymore. Search engines involve two primary tasks: retrieval of documents and ranking them in order of relevance. While improving that ranking is an extremely important part of improving the search experience, actually understanding that query helps give the searcher exactly what they’re looking for. This talk will show you what we are doing to make it easy for users to find what they want.

GO-FOOD uses the ElasticSearch stack with restaurant and dish indexes to search for what the user types. However, this results in only exact text matches and at most, fuzzy matches. We wanted to create a holistic search experience that not only personalised search results, but also retrieved restaurants and dishes that were more relevant to what the user was looking for. This is being done by not only taking advantage of ElasticSearch features, but also developing a Query semantics engine.

Query Understanding: What & Why

This is where Query Understanding comes into the picture: it’s about using NLP to correctly identify the search intent behind the query and return more relevant search results, it’s about the interpretation process even before the results are even retrieved and ranked. The semantic neighbours of the query itself become the focus of the search process: after all, if I don’t understand what you’re trying to ask for, how will I give you what you want?

In the duration of this talk, you will learn about how we are taking advantage of word embeddings to build a Query Understanding Engine that is holistically designed to make the customer’s experience as smooth as possible. I will go over the techniques we used to build each component of the engine, the data and algorithmic challenges we faced and how we solved each problem we came across.

Recommendation systems aid in consumer decision making processes
like what to buy, which books to read or movies to watch.
Recommendation systems are specially useful in e-commerce websites
where a user has to navigate through several hundred items
in order to get to what they’re looking for . The data on how users
interact with the systems can be used to analyze user behaviour and
make recommendations that are in line with users’ preferences of
certain item attributes over others. Collaborative filtering has, until
recently, been able to achieve personalization through user based
and item based collaborative filtering techniques. Recent advances
in the application of Deep Learning in research as well as industry
has led people to apply these techniques in recommendation systems.
Many recommendation systems use product features for recommendations.
However textual features available on products are
almost invariably incomplete in real-world datasets due to various
process related issues. Additionally, product features even when
available cannot describe completely a certain feature. These limit
the success of such recommendation techniques. Deep learning
systems can process multi-modal data like text, images, audio and
thus is our choice in implementing multi-modal recommendation
system.
In this talk we show a real-world application of a fashion recommendation
system. This is based on a multi-modal deep learning system which is able to address the problem of poor annotation in the product data. We evaluate different deep learning architectures
to process multi-modal data and compare their effectiveness. We
highlight the trade-offs seen in a real-world implementation and
how these trade-offs affect the actual choice of the architecture.

Anecdotally only 2% of the models developed are productionized, i.e., used day to day to improve business outcomes. Part of the reason is the high cost and complexity of productionization of models. It is estimated to be anywhere from 40 to 80% of the overall work.

In this talk, we will share Scribble Data’s insights into productionization of ML, and how to reduce the cost and complexity in organizations. It is based on the last two years of work at Scribble developing and deploying production ML Feature Engineering Platform, and study of platforms from major organizations such as Uber. This talk expands on a previous talk given in January.

First, we discuss the complexity of production ML systems, and where time and effort goes. Second, we give an overview of feature engineering, which is an expensive ML task, and the associated challenges Third, we suggest an architecture for Production Feature Engineering platform. Last, we discuss how one could go about building one for your organization

Knowledge representation has been a research for many years in AI world and its continuing further too. Once knowledge is represented, reasoning from that extracted knowledge is done by various inferencing techniques. Initial knowledge bases were built using rules from domain experts and different inferencing techniques like Fuzzy inference, Bayesian inference were applied to extract reasoning from those knowledge bases. Semantic networks is another form of knowledge representation which can represent structured data like WordNet, DBpedia which solves problems in a specific domain by storing entities and relations among entities using onotologies.

Knowledge graph is another representation technique deeply researched in academia as well as used by businesses in production to augment search relevancy in information retrieval(Google knowledgegraph), improve recommender systems, semantic search applications and also Question answering problems.In this talk i will illustrate the benefits of semantic knowledge graph, how it differs from Semantic ontologies, different technologies involved in building knowledge graph, how i built one to analyse unstructured (twitter data) to discover hidden relationships from the twitter corpus. I will also show how Knowledge graph is data scientist's tool kit to discover hidden relationships and insights from unstructured data quickly.

In this talk i will show the technology and architecture used to determine entity reputation and entity co-occurence using Knowledge graph.Scoring an entity for reputation is useful in many Natural language processing tasks and applications such as Recommender systems.

{ This is a handson workshop . The use case is Traffic analysis . }

Most machine learning models assume independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) data. Graphical models can capture almost arbitrarily rich dependency structures between variables. They encode conditional independence structure with graphs. Bayesian network, a type of graphical model describes a probability distribution among all variables by putting edges between the variable nodes, wherein edges represent the conditional probability factor in the factorized probability distribution. Thus Bayesian Networks provide a compact representation for dealing with uncertainty using an underlying graphical structure and the probability theory. These models have a variety of applications such as medical diagnosis, biomonitoring, image processing, turbo codes, information retrieval, document classification, gene regulatory networks, etc. amongst many others. These models are interpretable as they are able to capture the causal relationships between different features .They can work efficiently with small data and also deal with missing data which gives it more power than conventional machine learning and deep learning models.

In this session, we will discuss concepts of conditional independence, d- separation , Hammersley Clifford theorem , Bayes theorem, Expectation Maximization and Variable Elimination. There will be a code walk through of simple case study.

Language Wars have always been there for ages and it's got a new candidate with Data science booming - R vs Python. While the fans are fighting R vs Python, the creators (Hadley Wickham (Chief DS @ RStudio) and Wes McKinney (Creator of Pandas Project)) are working together as Ursa Labs team to create open source data science tools. A similar effort by RStudio has given birth to Reticulate (R Interface to Python) that helps programmers combine R and Python in the same code, session and project and create a new kind of super hero.

Containers are all the rage in the DevOps arena.

This session is a live demonstration of how the data team at Milliman uses containers at each step in their data science workflow -

1) How do containerized environments speed up data scientists at the data exploration stage

2) How do containers enable rapid prototyping and validation at the modeling stage

3) How do we put containerized models on production

4) How do containers make it easy for data scientists to do DevOps

5) How do containers make it easy for data scientists to host a data science dashboard with continuous integration and continuous delivery

Background

Data is the new oil and its size is growing exponentially day by day. Most of the companies are leveraging data science capabilities extensively to affect business decisions, perform audits on ML patterns, decode faults in business logic, and more. They run large number of machine learning model to produce results.

Problem Statement

Managing ML models in production is non-trivial. The training, maintenance, deployment, monitoring, organization and documentation of machine learning (ML) models – in short model management – is a critical task in virtually all production ML use cases. Wrong model management decisions can lead to poor performance of a ML system and can result in high maintenance cost and less effective utilization. Below are the key concern for model management:

1. Computational challenges: machine learning model definition and validation, decisions on model retraining, adversarial settings.
2. Data management challenges: lack of a declarative abstraction for the whole ML pipeline, querying model metadata, model interpretation.
3. Engineering challenges: multiple tools and frameworks make integration complex, heterogeneous skill level of users, backwards compatibility of trained Models and hard to reproduce the training result.

Existing Solution

There are custom ML platform to address the above concerns such as FBLearner by Facebook and Michelangelo by Uber but they have their own limitations like:

1. They standardize the data preparation, training and deployment loop specific to particular platform and business needs.
2. They are limited to a few algorithms and frameworks.
3. They tied to one company infrastructure and hard to open source.

Why MLflow?

Databricks team found above concerns as their motivation to develop MLflow as an open source and cloud agnostic machine learning model management platform. Benefits of MLflow from machine learning model management:

1. Works with any ML library and language.
2. They are platform independent i.e. ML models run in same way anywhere example local system or any cloud platform.
3. Designed to be useful for 1 or 10000 person organisation.

Open Data offers a tremendous opportunity in transformation of today’s manufacturing sector to smarter manufacturing. Smart Manufacturing initiatives include digitalising production processes and integrating IoT technologies for connecting machines to collect data for analysis and visualisation.

In this talk, an understanding of linkage between various industries within manufacturing sector through lens of Open Data Science will be illustrated. The data on manufacturing sector companies, company profiles, officers and financials will be scraped from UK Open Data API’s. The work I plan to showcase in ODSC is part of UK Made Smarter Project, where the work has been useful for major aerospace alliances to find out the champions and strugglers (SMEs) within manufacturing sector based on the open data gathered from multiple sources. The talk includes discussion on data extraction, data cleaning, data transformation - transforming raw financial information about companies to key metrics of interest - and further data analytics to create clusters of manufacturing companies into "Champions" and "Strugglers". The talk showcased examples of powerful R Shiny based dashboards of interest for suppliers, manufacturer and other key stakeholders in supply chain network.

Further analysis includes network analysis for industries, clustering and deploying the model as an API using Google Cloud Platform. The presenter will discuss about the necessity of 'Analytical Thinking' approach as an aid to handle complex big data projects and how to overcome challenges while working with real-life data science projects.

“We have built a machine learning model, What next?”

There is quite a bit of journey that one needs to cover from building a model in Jupyter notebook to taking it to production.
I would like to call it as the “last mile problem in ML” , this last mile could be a simple tread if we embrace some good ideas.

This talk covers some of these opinionated ideas on how we can get around some of the pitfalls in deployment of ML models in production.

We would go over the below questions in detail think about solutions for them.

• How to fix the zombie models apocalypse, a state when nobody knows how the model was trained ?
• In Science, experiments are found to be valid only if they are reproducible. Should this be the case in Datascience as well ?
• Training the model in your local machine and waiting for an eternity to complete is no fun. What are some better ways of doing this ?
• How do you package your machine learning code in a robust manner?
• Does an ML project have the luxury of not following good Software Engineering principles?

In this era of big data , Recommender systems are becoming increasingly important for businesses because they can help companies offer personalized product recommendations to customers. There have been many acknowledged recognized successes of consumer-oriented recommender systems, particularly in e-commerce. However, when it comes to Business to-Business (B2B) market space, there has been less research and real-time application of such systems.

In our case study, we present a hybrid approach of building a context-sensitive recommender system incorporating semantic knowledge in the form of domain ontology and a custom user- user collaborative filtering model in a B2B space. Using Engineering Products transaction data of an Instrumentation company, we demonstrate that this recommendation algorithm offers improved personalization, diversity and cold start performance compared to standard Collaborative Filtering based recommender system.

How many times did you feel that you were not able to understand someone else’s code or sometimes not even your own? It’s mostly because of bad/no documentation and not following the best practices. Here I will be demonstrating some of the best practices in Data Science, for R and Python, the two most important programming languages in the world for Data Science, which would help in building sustainable data products.

- Integrated Development Environment (RStudio, PyCharm)

- Coding best practices (Google’s R Style Guide and Hadley’s Style Guide, PEP 8)

- Linter (lintR, Pylint)

- Documentation – Code (Roxygen2, reStructuredText), README/Instruction Manual (RMarkdown, Jupyter Notebook)

- Unit testing (testthat, unittest)

- Packaging

- Version control (Git)

These best practices reduce technical debt in long term significantly, foster more collaboration and promote building of more sustainable data products in any organization.

Context:

The judicial system in India is an interconnected web of court complexes and establishments. It's a multi-tier system of 674 District courts, 25 State High courts, and the Supreme Court - all working together to bring justice to the 1.3BN citizens of this country. Information around new case registrations, pending and disposed case details creates a massive data pool of legal data

Challenge:

Data management, standardization and accessibility are some huge challenges and rarely there are cases where people cite these platforms for conducting important legal research on important topics of Case pendency and Case-law analysis, etc. This coupled with the stories of judicial corruption in the media has fueled a low level of trust in the Collegium. Current research is highly fragmented and is powered by data provided by some closed source tools which makes it extremely difficult to validate and conduct reproducible research

Solution:

We envisage an ‘Open Judicial Data Platform’ that makes it easy for researchers to get access to a range of information - making it possible to research about the oldest case while still accessing the latest court judgements - and takes the burden of data cleaning off their shoulders, thereby ensuring that they spend their time building the narrative. By building data tools on top of this data, we close the information loop by making it easier to digest these research pieces by other stakeholders, eventually increasing their scope to participate in the legal process.

Showcase:

I would like to share some insights:

1. On the process of creating this platform with our partners including legal researchers, lawyers and data scientists
2. overcoming the barrier of understanding the legal space
3. handling data and tech challenges using open tools and frictionless data packages
4. and making the platform available to a diverse set of user classes.

As one of the use cases of the platform, I would also like to demonstrate a case study where we used open source entity recognition tools such as Spacy on the text of legal judgements to understand the juvenile justice activity in the country

As kids, we always enjoyed stories. Some scary, some holy, some imbibing moral values & some just for fun.

Analytics is fun when you approach it with passion and curiosity. I know this because I have done this. With few case studies, I wish to illuminate your wits about Analytics and how it is being actively used in Banking and Financial Sector.

Come join me for a fun ride.

GoFood, the food delivery product of Gojek is one of the largest of its kind in the world. This talk summarizes the approaches considered and lessons learnt during the design and successful experimentation of a search system that uses ML to personalize the restaurant results based on the user’s food and taste preferences .

We formulated the estimation of the relevance as a Learning To Rank ML problem which makes the task of performing the ML inference for a very large number of customer-merchant pairs the next hurdle.
The talk will cover our learnings and findings for the following:
a. Creating a Learning Model for Food Search
b. Targetting experiments to a certain percentage of users
c. Training the model from real time data
d. Enriching Restaurant data with custom tags

Our story should help the audience in making design decisions on the data pipelines and software architecture needed when using ML for relevance ranking in high throughput search systems.

Natural Language Processing is a messy and complicated affair but modern advanced techniques are offering increasingly impressive results. Embeddings are a modern machine learning technique that has taken the natural language processing world by storm.

This hands-on tutorial will showcase the advantage of learning custom Word and Character Embeddings for natural language problems over pre-trained vectors like ELMo and BERT using a Named Entity Recognition case study over e-commerce data.