Predictive Analytics with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Second Edition

Foreword

Few people appreciate the enormous potential of machine learning (ML) in enterprise applications. I was lucky enough to get a taste of its potential benefits just a few months into my first job. It was 1995, and credit card issuers were beginning to adopt neural network models to detect credit card fraud in real time. When a credit card is used, transaction data from the point of sale system is sent to the card issuer’s credit authorization system where a neural network scores for the probability of fraud. If the probability is high, the transaction is declined in real time. I was a scientist building such models, and one of my first model deliveries was for a South American bank. When the model was deployed, the bank identified over ...