Abstract In this paper, we show how to apply machine learning to pricing and discounts. The goal is to create the optimal discounting strategy, which results in maximizing the total retail income. To do this, we use machine learning to predict sales based on given combination of discounts, and then we formulate and solve a […]
Training is an important part of any business today. Whether it is reading a book, learning online, or learning in class, but the pace of innovation does not leave any other choice. In my earlier post, I explained why there is a place and time for online learning (MOOC) and in-class learning. Numbers bear this […]
Earlier today I saw an image from this tweet: I thought I saw a few problems with it. So I decided to give the readers a more useful and correct version. Here is where things go wrong. The tweet confuses the “Internet of Things” and routers with vulnerable firmware or services several times, which are […]
The merger of Baker Hughes with GE’s oil and gas division closed this Monday. Said Lorenzo Simonelli, the new chief executive of Baker Hughes and former chief of GE Oil & Gas “When we decided to complete this merger, it was really to create a transformation in the industry.” There are many aspects to this […]
At our Houston Hadoop Meetup, Austin Sun showed how to prepare for the Cloudera Data Scientist Certification exam. Austin has prepared for this presentation for quite a while, passed the certification himself, and now shared his experience with others. The certification is definitely recommended by Sujee Maniyam in his “Launching Your Career in Big Data” […]
At ElephantScale, we practice what we preach. Here is one example. Our FreeEed project is open source eDiscovery, and it is popular with lawyers, legal tech, and data researchers. We apply continuous build (CI) to it: every time there is a commit to the developer branch, this causes a Jenkins build. This allows us to […]
Last month, Garrett Young of IBM presented at our Houston Hadoop & Spark Meetup. The topic was an interesting one: how is IBM planning to make money on an open source project, in that case, Spark. First, Garrett briefly introduced Spark and spelled out the reasons for IBM’s interest in Spark: it is performant, productive, […]
This is part of our migrating/updating to Spark 2 series. See all our posts on Spark and Spark2. This post explains how to process unstructured, text data using newer Spark 2 APIs Code repository Learning Spark @ Github And here is the code on Github Screencast Sample data Nursery rhyme : twinkle twinkle little star. […]
Motivation Spark is an amazing computing framework. Spark version 2 has lots of exciting stuff. And Hadoop vendors Cloudera and Hortonworks are now supporting Spark 2 on their platforms. So we anticipate lot of people would be upgrading or migrating to Spark 2. However, lots of Spark tutorials and code samples on the web are […]
In his article, “How the pioneers of MOOC got it all wrong,” Robert Ubell quotes surprising statistics. To-day, 58 million people have signed up for an MOOC (which stands for Massive Open Online Courses), but the completion rate is between 7% to 12%. Many people quit watching after a few minutes, and many are just […]