The Fifth Elephant 2014

A conference on big data and analytics

In 2014, infrastructure components such as Hadoop, Berkeley Data Stack and other commercial tools have stabilized and are thriving. The challenges have moved higher up the stack from data collection and storage to data analysis and its presentation to users. The focus for this year’s conference on analytics – the infrastructure that powers analytics and how analytics is done.

Talks will cover various forms of analytics including real-time and opportunity analytics, and technologies and models used for analyzing data.

Proposals will be reviewed using 5 criteria:
Domain diversity – proposals will be selected from different domains – medical, insurance, banking, online transactions, retail. If there is more than one proposal from a domain, the one which meets the editorial criteria will be chosen.
Novelty – what has been done beyond the obvious.
Insights – what insights does the proposal share with the audience that they did not know earlier.
Practical versus theoretical – we are looking for applied knowledge. If the proposal covers material that can be looked up online, it will not be considered.
Conceptual versus tools-centric – tell us why, not how. Tell the audience what was the philosophy underlying your use of an application, not how an application was used.
Presentation skills – proposer’s presentation skills will be reviewed carefully and assistance provided to ensure that the material is communicated in the most precise and effective manner to the audience.

Tickets: http://fifthel.doattend.com

Website: https://fifthelephant.in/2014

For queries about proposals / submissions, write to info@hasgeek.com

Theme

  1. Data Collection and Transport – for e.g, Opendatatoolkit, Scribe, Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.

  2. Data Storage, Caching and Management – Distributed storage (such as Gluster, HDFS) or hardware-specific (such as SSD or memory) or databases (Postgresql, MySQL, Infobright) or caching/storage (Memcache, Cassandra, Redis, etc).

  3. Data Processing, Querying and Analysis – Oozie, Azkaban, scikit-learn, Mahout, Impala, Hive, Tez, etc.

  4. Real-time analytics

  5. Opportunity analytics

  6. Big data and security

  7. Big data and internet of things

  8. Data Usage and BI (Business Intelligence) in different sectors.

Please note: the technology stacks mentioned above indicate latest technologies that will be of interest to the community. Talks should not be on the technologies per se, but how these have been used and implemented in various sectors, enterprises and contexts.

Hosted by

The Fifth Elephant - known as one of the best data science and Machine Learning conference in Asia - has transitioned into a year-round forum for conversations about data and ML engineering; data science in production; data security and privacy practices. more

Shailesh Kumar

@shkumar

The ART of Data Mining - Practical Learnings from Real-world Data Mining applications

Submitted Jun 3, 2014

Machine Learning and data mining is part SCIENCE (ML algorithms, optimization), part ENGINEERING (large scale modeling, real-time decisions), part PROCESS (data understanding, feature engineering, modelling, evaluation, and deployment), and part ART. In this talk we will focus more on the “ART of data mining” - the little things that make the big difference in the quality and sophistication of machine learning models we build. Using real-world analytics problems from a variety of domains, we will share a number of practical learnings in:

(1) The art of understanding the data better - (e.g. visualization of text data in a semantic space)

(2) The art of feature engineering - (e.g. converting raw inputs into meaningful and discriminative features)

(3) The art of dealing with nuances in class labels - (e.g. creating, sampling, and cleaning up class labels)

(4) The art of combining labeled and unlabeled data - (e.g. semi-supervised and active learning)

(5) The art of decomposing a complex modelling problem into simpler ones - (e.g. divide and conquer)

(6) The art of using textual features with structured features to build models, etc.

The key objective of the talk is to share some of the learnings that might come in handy while “designing” and “debugging” machine learning solutions and to give a fresh perspective on why data mining is still mostly an ART.

Outline

The role of a data scientist has evolved in the last few years from someone who can “put-together” a “modelling pipeline” to someone who can: (a) “understand” the data beyond basic statistics and simple visualizations, (b) extract “deep” and “novel” insights from the data, (c) engineer “better features” to fairly distribute complexity between features and models, (d) visualize and make sense of complex data types like networks, unstructured text corpora, etc., and (e) create innovative ways of harnessing data to make smarter decisions.

In order to create “magic from data”, a data scientist must go beyond the SCIENCE, ENGINEERING, and PROCESS and delve into the ART of data mining. In this talk I will share a number of “mistakes” and “innovations” in this context that helped me build better models in domains as diverse as remote sensing, text classification, text clustering, fraud detection, information retrieval, bioinformatics, retail data mining, and image understanding, etc.

These practical insights might help the audience pay attention to the right details in the modelling process, look for model improvements in the right places, be more creative with their data and use its full potential, and even overcome the limitations of their modeling tools.

Requirements

This talk is more about modelling methodology insights than tools and algorithms. Some prior experience with building machine learning models (in any domaiin, using any technique) might be helpful but not required.

Speaker bio

http://www.linkedin.com/in/shaileshk

Comments

{{ gettext('Login to leave a comment') }}

{{ gettext('Post a comment…') }}
{{ gettext('New comment') }}
{{ formTitle }}

{{ errorMsg }}

{{ gettext('No comments posted yet') }}

Hosted by

The Fifth Elephant - known as one of the best data science and Machine Learning conference in Asia - has transitioned into a year-round forum for conversations about data and ML engineering; data science in production; data security and privacy practices. more