Rules-Based AI and Machine Learning AI – Combining the Best of Both

When we introduced rules as the book’s main approach to artificial intelligence (AI) back in Chapter 1, we mentioned machine learning (ML) as a complementary technique. We’ve spent the 10 chapters since then focusing on business rules and integrating them with Excel. So, it’s about time that we returned to the ML side of AI—with a focus on how to combine the two approaches to AI to get the most effective use of AI in your business.

Taking a graphical approach, we’ll explore the thinking behind ML based on sample data from our online chocolate shop. We’ll introduce notebooks, Python, and Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) and apply these tools to train a simple ML model. We’ll integrate this trained model into a rules-based decision model to improve the recommendation sample we first met in Chapter 4. Finally, since this is only one chapter and very much opening...