Wayne Thompson, Chief Data Scientist at SAS, is a globally renowned presenter, teacher, practitioner and innovator in the fields of data mining and machine learning. He has worked alongside the world's biggest and most challenging organizations to help them harness analytics to build high performing organizations. Over the course of his 24 year tenure at SAS, Wayne has been credited with bringing to market landmark SAS analytics technologies, including SAS Text Miner, SAS Credit Scoring for Enterprise Miner, SAS Model Manager, SAS Rapid Predictive Modeler, SAS Visual Statistics and more. His current focus initiatives include easy to use self-service data mining tools along with deep learning and cognitive computing tool kits.
What does the AI enterprise of the future look like? That’s a tough question that I’ve been asked to consider, along with a distinguished panel at Valley ML AI Expo 2020. The title of the panel is, “Life, the Universe and the AI Enterprise of the Future.” Based on an initial chat with panel chair Gautam Khera, I’ve written up some possible topics we’ll be covering on the panel. Consider
Data scientists naturally use a lot of machine learning algorithms, which work well for detecting patterns, automating simple tasks, generalizing responses and other data heavy tasks. As a subfield of computer science, machine learning evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence. Over time, machine learning has borrowed from many
Deep learning has taken off because organizations of all sizes are capturing a greater variety of data and can mine bigger data, including unstructured data. It’s not just large companies like Amazon, SAS and Google that have access to big data. It’s everywhere. Deep learning needs big data, and now
A chatbot is a computer program that uses natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence to simulate human conversation and derive a response. Essentially, it’s a machine that can chat with you or respond to your chatter. Chatbots can save time and money when used to handle simple, automated tasks.
In my 25 years at SAS, I‘ve noticed the continued use of important algorithms, such as logistic regression and decision trees, which I’m sure will continue to be steady staples for data scientists. After all, they’re easy-to-use, interpretable algorithms. However, they’re not always the most accurate and stable classifiers. To
This is the final post in my series of machine learning best practices. If you missed the earlier posts, start at the beginning, or read the whole series by clicking on the image to the right. While post four in the series was about combining different types of models, this
This is the seventh post in my series of machine best practices. Catch up by reading the first post or the whole series now. Generalization is the learned model’s ability to fit well to new, unseen data instead of the data it was trained on. Overfitting refers to a model that fits
This is the sixth post in my series of machine learning best practices. If you've come across the series for the first time, you can go back to the beginning or read the whole series. Aristotle was likely one of the first data scientists who studied empiricism by learning through
This is the fifth post in my series of machine learning best practices. Hyperparameters are the algorithm options one "turns and tunes" when building a learning model. Hyperparameters cannot be learned using that algorithm. So, these parameters need to be assigned before training of the model. A lot of manual
This is the fourth post in my series of 10 machine learning best practices. It’s common to build models on historical training data and then apply the model to new data to make decisions. This process is called model deployment or scoring. I often hear data scientists say, “It took
This is the third post in my series of machine learning techniques and best practices. If you missed the earlier posts, read the first one now, or review the whole machine learning best practices series. Data scientists commonly use machine learning algorithms, such as gradient boosting and decision forests, that automatically build
This is the second post in my series of machine learning best practices. If you missed it, read the first post, Machine learning best practices: the basics. As we go along, all ten tips will be archived at this machine learning best practices page. Machine learning commonly requires the use of
I started my training in machine learning at the University of Tennessee in the late 1980s. Of course, we didn’t call it machine learning then, and we didn’t call ourselves data scientists yet either. We used terms like statistics, analytics, data mining and data modeling. Regardless of what you call
If cognitive computing were adopted widely by companies in the travel industry, what would a typical trip look like for a business traveler? Might some of your biggest travel frustrations be relieved? Let’s find out. It’s a beautiful day, and you have an important customer briefing in LA. You’ve already
I’ve been giving presentations about SAS® ViyaTM for a couple of months now, and the reactions have been positive. I’m part of a much bigger cast of speakers at SAS who talk about the new analytics platform with key customers and analysts. While some presenters focus on the overarching benefits or the
