Chapter 10. Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning

Predictive analytics and machine learning have recently been accepted into mainstream data science and data analytics by many industries. They are now compared to other fields, and, without a doubt, we can expect a lot of rapid growth. It is even predicted that machine learning will accelerate so fast that within mere decades human labor will be replaced by intelligent machines (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity). The current state of art for artificial general intelligence (AGI) is far from that utopia, but machine learning has come a long way, and is being used in self-driving cars, chatbots, and AI-based assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Ok Google. A lot of computing power and data is still needed to make even simple decisions, such as determining whether pictures on the Internet contain dogs or cats. Predictive analytics uses a variety of techniques, including machine...