Ever wonder how apps, websites, and machines seem to be able to predict the future? Like how Amazon knows what your next purchase may be, or how self-driving cars can safely navigate a complex traffic situation?

The answer lies in machine learning.

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that often leverages Python to build systems that can learn from and make decisions based on data. Instead of explicitly programming the machine to solve the problem, we show it how it was solved in the past and the machine learns the key steps that are required to do the same task on its own.

Machine learning is revolutionizing every industry by bringing greater value to companies’ years of saved data. Leveraging machine learning enables organizations to make more precise decisions instead of following intuition.

There’s an explosive amount of innovation around machine learning that’s being used within organizations, especially given that the technology is still in its early days. Many companies have invested heavily in building recommendation and personalization engines for their customers. But, machine learning is also being applied in a huge variety of back-office use cases as well, like to forecast sales, identify production bottlenecks, build efficient traffic routing systems, and more.

Machine learning algorithms fall into two categories: supervised and unsupervised learning.

Supervised Learning

Supervised learning tries to predict a future value by relying on training from past data. For instance, Netflix’s movie-recommendation engine is most likely supervised. It uses a user’s past movie ratings to train the model, then predicts what their rating would likely be for movies they haven’t seen and recommends the ones that score highly.

Supervised learning enjoys more commercial success than unsupervised learning. Some common use cases include fraud detection, image recognition, credit scoring, product recommendation, and malfunction prediction.

Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning is about uncovering hidden structures within data sets. It’s helpful in identifying segments or groups, especially when there is no prior information available about them. These algorithms are commonly used in market segmentation. They enable marketers to identify target segments in order to maximize revenue, create anomaly detection systems to identify suspicious user behavior, and more.

For instance, Netflix may know how many customers it has, but wants to understand what kind of groupings they fall into in order to offer services targeted to them. The streaming service may have 50 or more different customer types, aka, segments, but its data team doesn’t know this yet. If the company knows that most of its customers are in the “families with children” segment, it can invest in building specific programs to meet those customer needs. But, without that information, Netflix’s data experts can’t create a supervised machine learning system.

So, they build an unsupervised machine learning algorithm instead, which identifies and extracts various customer segments within the data and allows them to identify groups such as “families with children” or “working professionals.”

How Python, SQL, and Machine Learning Work Together

To understand how SQL, Python, and machine learning relate to one another, let’s think of them as a factory. As a concept, a factory can produce anything if it has the right tools. More often than not, the tools used in factories are pretty similar (e.g., hammers and screwdrivers).

What’s amazing is that there can be factories that use those same tools but produce completely different products (e.g., tables versus chairs). The difference between these factories is not the tools, but rather how the factory workers use their expertise to leverage these tools and produce a different result.

In this case, our goal would be to produce a machine learning model, and our tools would be SQL and Python. We can use SQL to extract data from a database and Python to shape the data and perform the analyses that ultimately produce a machine learning model. Your knowledge of machine learning will ultimately enable you to achieve your goal.

To round out the analogy, an app developer, with no understanding of machine learning, might choose to use SQL and Python to build a web app. Again, the tools are the same, but the practitioner uses their expertise to apply them in a different way.

Machine Learning at Work

A wide variety of roles can benefit from machine learning know-how. Here are just a few:

• Data scientist or analyst: Data scientists or analysts use machine learning to answer specific business questions for key stakeholders. They might help their company’s user experience (UX) team determine which website features most heavily drive sales.
• Machine learning engineer: A machine learning engineer is a software engineer specifically responsible for writing code that leverages machine learning models. For example, they might build a recommendation engine that suggests products to customers.
• Research scientist: A machine learning research scientist develops new technologies like computer vision for self-driving cars or advancements in neural networks. Their findings enable data professionals to deliver new insights and capabilities.

Machine Learning in Everyday Life: Real-World Examples

While machine learning-powered innovations like voice-activated robots seem ultra-futuristic, the technology behind them is actually widely used today. Here are some great examples of how machine learning impacts your daily life:

• Recommendation engines: Think about how Spotify makes music recommendations. The recommendation engine peeks at the songs and albums you’ve listened to in the past, as well as tracks listened to by users with similar tastes. It then starts to learn the factors that influence your music preferences and stores them in a database, recommending similar music that you haven’t listened to — all without writing any explicit rules!
• Voice-recognition technology: We’ve seen the emergence of voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. These interactive systems are based entirely on voice-recognition technology powered by machine learning models.
• Risk mitigation and fraud prevention: Insurers and creditors use machine learning to make accurate predictions on fraudulent claims based on previous consumer behavior, rather than relying on traditional analysis or human judgement. They also can use these analyses to identify high-risk customers. Both of these analyses help companies process requests and claims more quickly and at a lower cost.
• Photo identification via computer vision: Machine learning is common among photo-heavy services like Facebook and the home-improvement site Houzz. Each of these services use computer vision — an aspect of machine learning — to automatically tag objects in photos without human intervention. For Facebook, these tend to be faces, whereas Houzz seeks to identify individual objects and link to a place where users can purchase them.

Why You and Your Business Need to Understand Data Science

As the world becomes increasingly data-driven, learning to leverage key technologies like machine learning — along with the programming languages Python (which helps power machine learning algorithms) and SQL — will create endless possibilities for your career and your organization. There are many pathways into this growing field, as detailed by our Data Science Standards Board, and now’s a great time to dive in.

In our paper A Beginner’s Guide to SQL, Python, and Machine Learning, we break down these three data sectors. These skills go beyond data to bring delight, efficiency, and innovation to countless industries. They empower people to drive businesses forward with a speed and precision previously unknown.

Individuals can use data know-how to improve their problem-solving skills, become more cross-functional, build innovative technology, and more. For companies, leveraging these technologies means smarter use of data. This can lead to greater efficiency, employees who are empowered to use data in innovative ways, and business decisions that drive revenue and success.

Download the paper to learn more.

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