predictive analytics!
the future of predicting the future
Vedant Misra
vedant.misra@gmail.com
Boston BarCamp 2011

the big picture
We are witnessing a data explosion.
"Everywhere you look, the quantity of
information in the world is soaring.
According to one estimate, mankind created
150 exabytes of data in 2005.
This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes."
The Data Deluge. The Economist, Feb 25, 2010.
P.S. 1 exabyte is 1 million terabytes.

the big picture
We are witnessing a data explosion.
"we create as much information* in two
days now as we did from the dawn of man
through 2003"
-Larry Page, CEO, Google
*This is mostly lolcats and duckface photos.

the problem
data
information
knowledge

modus operandi
1. ngest data
I
• tructured
s
• nstructured
u
2. igest data
D
• LP
N
• ntity extraction
e
3. pit data back up
S
• isualization
v
• ederated search
f

the state of the art
Omniture, Stratify, Jedox, Bime, Kosmix, I2, SpotFire, Quid
Scoremind, Birst, Predixion Software, PivotLink, GoodData, Endeca,
FSI, Informatica, IBM, Kofax, SPSS, Data Applied,
Mathematica, Matlab, Octave, R, Stata, Statistica, ROOT, Geant,
Attensity360, Sysomos, SAS, ISS CIDNE, Centrifuge Systems,
Prediction Company, CASA, Info Mesa, FreeBase, YouCalc, Inxight

Palantir.

Digital Reasoning

IBM DeepQA

ingesting data
• tructured information
s
• xplicitly defined format
e
• elationships are clear
r
• SVs, relational
C
databases, XLS
• nstructured information
u
• o data model
n
• ixed text, numbers,
m
figures
• mails, webpages,
e
books, health records,
call logs, phone
recordings, video footage

digesting data
• o NLP
D
• okenize
t
• etermine POS
d
• emmatize
l
• xtract entities
E
• ategorize entities
C
using a dynamic
ontology
• eographical tagging
G
• ssociative net
A

spitting up data
• owerful visualizations
p
• ederated search
f
• eospatial, spatial, temporal
g
• ersistent background search (alerts)
p

complications
• igh-resolution access control
h
• ource, date, location, and other
s
metadata for tracking pedigree and
lineage
• dding insight and new data back into
a
data layer
• ir-gapped networks
a
• evisioning databases
r
• eal-time hypothesis and intuition
r
sharing

what's left?
• eep analytics: platforms that
d
understand
• eplacing IA with AI
r
• ven fancier statistical methods
e
naive Bayes classifier, support vector machine, kernel
estimation, neural networks, k-nearest neighbor,
k-means clustering, kernel PCA, hierarchical clustering, linear
regression, neural networks, gaussian process regression,
principal component analysis, independent component
analysis, hidden Markov models, maximum entropy Markov
models, Kalman filters, particle filters,
Bayesian networks, Markov random fields, bootstrap
aggregating, ensemble averaging...

what's left?
• ore science of prediction:
m
• odelling and validation
m
• enetic algorithms for finding
g
symbolic expressions
• hen are systems unpredictable?
w
• escribing groups with game
d
theory
• hen is individual behavior
w
important?

thanks!