Launching Machine Learning: Delivering Operational Success with Gold Standard ML Leadership (Coursera)

Machine learning runs the world. It generates predictions for each individual customer, employee, voter, and suspect, and these predictions drive millions of business decisions more effectively, determining whom to call, mail, approve, test, diagnose, warn, investigate, incarcerate, set up on a date, or medicate.

But, to make this work, you've got to bridge what is a prevalent gap between business leadership and technical know-how. Launching machine learning is as much a management endeavor as a technical one. Its success relies on a very particular business leadership practice. This means that two different species must cooperate in harmony: the business leader and the quant.

Whether you'll participate on the business or tech side of a machine learning project, this course delivers essential, pertinent know-how. You'll learn the business-level fundamentals needed to ensure the core technology works within – and successfully produces value for – business operations. If you're more a quant than a business leader, you’ll find this is a rare opportunity to ramp up on the business side, since technical ML trainings don’t usually go there. But know this: The soft skills are often the hard ones.

After this course, you will be able to:

– Apply ML: Identify the opportunities where machine learning can improve marketing, sales, financial credit scoring, insurance, fraud detection, and much more.

– Plan ML: Determine the way in which machine learning will be operationally integrated and deployed, and the staffing and data requirements to get there.

– Greenlight ML: Forecast the effectiveness of a machine learning project and then internally sell it, gaining buy-in from your colleagues.

– Lead ML: Manage a machine learning project, from the generation of predictive models to their launch.

– Prep data for ML: Oversee the data preparation, which is directly informed by business priorities.

– Evaluate ML: Report on the performance of predictive models in business terms, such as profit and ROI.

– Regulate ML: Manage ethical pitfalls, such as when predictive models reveal sensitive information about individuals, including whether they're pregnant, will quit their job, or may be arrested.

No hands-on and no heavy math. Rather than a hands-on training, this course serves both business leaders and burgeoning data scientists alike by contextualizing the core technology, guiding you on the end-to-end process required to successfully deploy a predictive model so that it delivers a business impact. There are no exercises involving coding or the use of machine learning software.

Who it's for.This concentrated entry-level program is for anyone who wishes to participate in the commercial deployment of machine learning, no matter whether you’ll do so in the role of enterprise leader or quant. This includes business professionals and decision makers of all kinds, such as executives, directors, line of business managers, and consultants – as well as data scientists.

Like a university course. This course is also a good fit for college students, or for those planning for or currently enrolled in an MBA program. The breadth and depth of the overall three-course specialization is equivalent to one full-semester MBA or graduate-level course.

In- depth yet accessible. Brought to you by industry leader Eric Siegel – a winner of teaching awards when he was a professor at Columbia University – this curriculum stands out as one of the most thorough, engaging, and surprisingly accessible on the subject of machine learning.

Vendor-neutral. This specialization includes illuminating software demos of machine learning in action using SAS products. However, the curriculum is vendor-neutral and universally-applicable. The contents and learning objectives apply, regardless of which machine learning software tools you end up choosing to work with.
Prerequisites

Before this course, learners should take the first of this specialization's three courses, "The Power of Machine Learning: Boost Business, Accumulate Clicks, Fight Fraud, and Deny Deadbeats."
What You Will Learn

- Apply ML: Identify opportunities where machine learning can improve marketing, sales, financial credit scoring, insurance, fraud detection, and more

- Plan ML: Determine the way machine learning will be operationally integrated and deployed, and the staffing and data requirements to get there

- Greenlight ML: Forecast the effectiveness of a machine learning project and then internally sell it, gaining buy-in from your colleagues

- Lead ML: Manage a machine learning project, from the generation of predictive models to their launch

Course 2 of 3 in the Machine Learning for Everyone with Eric Siegel Specialization.

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Business Applications of Machine Learning

This module dives deeply into the business applications of machine learning – for marketing, financial services, fraud detection and more. We'll illustrate the value delivered for these domains by way of case studies and detailed examples. And we'll precisely measure the performance of the predictive models themselves, focusing on model lift, a predictive multiplier that tells you the improvement achieved by a model.

WEEK 2

Scoping, Greenlighting, and Managing Machine Learning Initiatives

To make machine learning work, you've got to bridge what is a prevalent gap between business leadership and technical know-how. Launching machine learning is as much a management endeavor as a technical one. Its success relies on a very particular business leadership practice. This module will demonstrate that practice, guiding you to lead the end-to-end implementation of machine learning.

WEEK 3

Data Prep: Preparing the Training Data

The greatest technical hands-on bottleneck of a machine learning project is the preparation of the training data – which is the raw material that predictive modeling software crunches, munches, and learns from. This module will guide you to prepare that data. Business priorities are front and center in the process, since they directly inform the data requirements, including the specific meaning of the dependent variable, which is the outcome or behavior your model will actually predict.

WEEK 4

The High Cost of False Promises, False Positives, and Misapplied Models

For many machine learning projects, high accuracy is unattainable – and, besides, accuracy isn't the right metric in the first place. The first portion of this module will demonstrate how other metrics, such as the costs incurred by prediction errors, better serve to keep a machine learning project on track. Then we'll turn to the social good that can be achieved with machine learning, and we'll cover more social justice risks, including the hazards of predicting sensitive information such as pregnancy, job resignations, death, and ethnicity. We'll wrap up by examining the promise and perils of predictive policing.