On Big Data and Data Science. Interview with James Kobielus
“One of the most typical mistakes in large-scale data projects is losing sight of the biases that may skew the insights you extract.”– James Kobielus
On the topics of Big Data, and Data Science, I have interviewed James Kobielus, IBM Big Data Evangelist.
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Q1. What kind of companies generate Big Data, besides the Internet giants?
James Kobielus: Big data isn’t something you “generate.” Rather, the term refers to the ability to achieve differentiated value from advanced analytics on trustworthy data at any scale. In other words, it’s a best practice, not a specific type of data or even a specific scale of data (measured in volume, velocity, and/or variety).
When considered in this light, you can identify big data analytic applications in every industry. Every C-level executive has strategic applications of big data. Here are just a smattering:
- Chief Marketing Officers have been the prime movers on many big data initiatives that involve Hadoop, NoSQL, and other approaches. Their primary applications consist of marketing campaign optimization, customer churn and loyalty, upsell and cross-sell analysis, targeted offers, behavioral targeting, social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, brand monitoring, influencer analysis, customer experience optimization, content optimization, and placement optimization
- Chief Information Officers use big data platforms for data discovery, data integration, business analytics, advanced analytics, exploratory data science.
- Chief Operations Officers rely on big data for supply chain optimization, defect tracking, sensor monitoring, and smart grid, among other applications.
- Chief Information Security Officer run security incident and event management, anti-fraud detection, and other sensitive applications on big data.
- Chief Technology Officers do IT log analysis, event analytics, network analytics, and other systems monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization applications on big data.
- Chief Financial Officers run complex financial risk analysis and mitigation modeling exercises on big data platforms.
Q2. What are the most challenging problems you are facing when analysing Big Data?
James Kobielus: Searching for actionable intelligence in big data involves building and testing advanced-analytics models against large volumes of complex data that may be flowing in at high velocities.
At these scales, it’s easy to get overwhelmed in your analysis unless you automate the end-to-end processes of extracting intelligence at scale. Automation can also help control the cost of managing a growing volume of algorithmic models against ever expanding big-data collections. The key processes that need automating are data discovery, profiling, sampling, and preparation, as well as model building, scoring, and deployment.
Q3. How do you typically handle them?
James Kobielus: Automating the modeling process will boost data scientist productivity by an order of magnitude, freeing them from drudgery so that they can focus on the sorts of exploration, modeling, and visualization challenges that demand expert human judgment. Data scientists can accelerate their modeling automation initiatives by following these steps:
- Virtualize access to data, metadata, rules, and predictive models, as well as to data integration, data warehousing, and advanced analytic applications through a BI semantic virtualization layer;
- Unify access, governance, orchestration, automation, and administration across these resources within a service-oriented architecture;
- Explore commercial tools that support maximum automation of model development, scoring, deployment, and execution;
- Consolidate, accelerate, and deepen predictive analytics through integration into big-data platforms with scalable in-database execution; and
- Migrate existing analytical data marts into multidomain big-data platforms with unified data, metadata, and model governance within service-oriented virtualization framework.
Q4. What are in your experience the typical mistakes made in large scale data projects?
James Kobielus: One of the most typical mistakes in large-scale data projects is losing sight of the biases that may skew the insights you extract.
Even if you accept that a data scientist’s integrity is rock-solid, intentions pure, skills stellar, and discipline rigorous, there’s no denying that bias may creep inadvertently into their work with big data. The biases may be minor or major, episodic or systematic, tangential or material to their findings and recommendations. Whatever their nature, the biases must be understood and corrected as fully as possible.
Here are some of the key sources of bias that may crop up in a data scientist’s work with big data:
- Cognitive bias: This is the tendency to make skewed decisions based on pre-existing cognitive and heuristic factors–such as a misunderstanding of probabilities–rather than on the data and other hard evidence. You might say that the educated intuition that drives data science is rife with cognitive bias, but that’s not always a bad thing.
- Selection bias: This is the tendency to skew your choice of data sources to those that may be most available, convenient, and cost-effective for your purposes, as opposed to being necessarily the most valid and relevant for your study. Clearly, data scientists do not have unlimited budgets, may operate under tight deadlines, and don’t use data for which they lack authorization. These constraints may introduce an unconscious bias in the big-data collections they are able to assemble.
- Sampling bias: This is the tendency to skew the sampling of data sets toward subgroups of the population most relevant to the initial scope of a data-science project, thereby making it unlikely that you will uncover any meaningful correlations that may apply to other segments. Another source of sampling bias is “data dredging,” in which the data scientist uses regression techniques that may find correlations in samples but that may not be statistically significant in the wider population. Consequently, you’re likely to spuriously confirm your initial model for the segments that happen to make the sampling cut.
- Modeling bias: Beyond the biases just discussed, this is the tendency to skew data-science models by starting with a biased set of project assumptions that drive selection of the wrong variables, the wrong data, the wrong algorithms, and the wrong metrics of fitness. In addition, overfitting of models to past data without regard for predictive lift is a common bias. Likewise, failure to score and iterate models in a timely fashion with fresh observational data also introduces model decay, hence bias.
- Funding bias: This may be the most silent but pernicious bias in data-scientific studies of all sorts. It’s the unconscious tendency to skew all modeling assumptions, interpretations, data, and applications to favor the interests of the party–employer, customer, sponsor, etc.–that employs or otherwise financially supports the data-science initiative. Funding bias makes it highly unlikely that data scientists will uncover disruptive insights that will “break the rice bowl” in which they make their living.
Q5. How do you measure “success” when analysing data?
James Kobielus: You measure success in your ability to distill useful insights in a timely fashion from the data at your disposal.
Q6. What skills are required to be an effective Data Scientist?
James Kobielus: Data science’s learning curve is formidable. To a great degree, you will need a degree, or something substantially like it, to prove you’re committed to this career. You will need to submit yourself to a structured curriculum to certify you’ve spent the time, money and midnight oil necessary for mastering this demanding discipline.
Sure, there are run-of-the-mill degrees in data-science-related fields, and then there are uppercase, boldface, bragging-rights “DEGREES.” To some extent, it matters whether you get that old data-science sheepskin from a traditional university vs. an online school vs. a vendor-sponsored learning program. And it matters whether you only logged a year in the classroom vs. sacrificed a considerable portion of your life reaching for the golden ring of a Ph.D. And it certainly matters whether you simply skimmed the surface of old-school data science vs. pursued a deep specialization in a leading-edge advanced analytic discipline.
But what matters most to modern business isn’t that every data scientist has a big honking doctorate. What matters most is that a substantial body of personnel has a common grounding in core curriculum of skills, tools and approaches. Ideally, you want to build a team where diverse specialists with a shared foundation can collaborate productively.
Big data initiatives thrive if all data scientists have been trained and certified on a curriculum with the following foundation:
- Paradigms and practices: Every data scientist should acquire a grounding in core concepts of data science, analytics and data management. They should gain a common understanding of the data science lifecycle, as well as the typical roles and responsibilities of data scientists in every phase. They should be instructed on the various role(s) of data scientists and how they work in teams and in conjunction with business domain experts and stakeholders. And they learn a standard approach for establishing, managing and operationalizing data science projects in the business.
- Algorithms and modeling: Every data scientist should obtain a core understanding of linear algebra, basic statistics, linear and logistic regression, data mining, predictive modeling, cluster analysis, association rules, market basket analysis, decision trees, time-series analysis, forecasting, machine learning, Bayesian and Monte Carlo Statistics, matrix operations, sampling, text analytics, summarization, classification, primary components analysis, experimental design, unsupervised learning constrained optimization.
- Tools and platforms: Every data scientist should master a core group of modeling, development and visualization tools used on your data science projects, as well as the platforms used for storage, execution, integration and governance of big data in your organization. Depending on your environment, and the extent to which data scientists work with both structured and unstructured data, this may involve some combination of data warehousing, Hadoop, stream computing, NoSQL and other platforms. It will probably also entail providing instruction in MapReduce, R and other new open-source development languages, in addition to SPSS, SAS and any other established tools.
- Applications and outcomes: Every data scientist should learn the chief business applications of data science in your organization, as well as in how to work best with subject-domain experts. In many companies, data science focuses on marketing, customer service, next best offer, and other customer-centric applications. Often, these applications require that data scientists understand how to leverage customer data acquired from structured survey tools, sentiment analysis software, social media monitoring tools and other sources. It also essential that every data scientist gain an understanding of the key business outcomes–such as maximizing customer lifetime value–that should focus their modeling initiatives.
Classroom instruction is important, but a curriculum that is 100 percent devoted to reading books, taking tests and sitting through lectures is insufficient. Hands-on laboratory work is paramount for a truly well-rounded data scientist. Make sure that your data scientists acquire certifications and degrees that reflect them actually developing statistical models that use real data and address substantive business issues.
A business-oriented data-science curriculum should produce expert developers of statistical and predictive models. It should not degenerate into a program that produces analytics geeks with heads stuffed with theory but whose diplomas are only fit for hanging on the wall.
Q7. Hadoop vs. Spark: what are the pros and cons?
James Kobielus: Big data analytics infrastructures are growing more hybridized than ever. Every new technology—such as Hadoop, in-memory databases, and graph databases—finds its specific niche in terms of use cases, deployment modes, and applications for which it is best suited.
Even as Apache Spark pushes more deeply into big-data environments, it won’t substantially change this trend. Yes, of course Spark is on the fast track to ubiquity in big-data analytics. This is especially true for the next generation of machine-learning applications that feed on growing in-memory pools and require low-latency distributed computations for streaming and graph analytics. But those use cases aren’t the sum total of big-data analytics and never will be.
As we all grow more infatuated with Spark, it’s important to continually remind ourselves of what it’s not suitable for. If, for example, one considers all the critical data management, integration, and preparation tasks that must be performed prior to modeling in Spark, it’s clear that these will not be executed in any of the Spark engines (Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, GraphX). Instead, they’ll be carried out in the data platforms and elastic clusters (HDFS, Cassandra, HBase, Mesos, cloud services, etc.) upon which those engines run. Likewise, you’d be hardpressed to find anyone who’s seriously considering Spark in isolation for data warehousing, data governance, master data management, or operational business intelligence.
Above all else, Spark is the new power tool for data scientists who are pushing boundaries in the emerging era of in-memory big data analytics in low-latency scenarios of all types. Spark is proving its value as a development tool for the new generation of data scientists building the in-memory statistical models upon which it all will depend.
Let’s not fall into the delusion that everything is converging toward Spark, as if it were the ravenous maw that will devour every other big-data analytics tool and platform. Spark is just another approach that’s being fitted to and optimized for specific purposes.
And let’s resist the hype that treats Spark as Hadoop’s “successor.” This implies that Hadoop and other big-data approaches are “legacy,” rather than what they are, which is foundational. For example, no one is seriously considering doing “data lakes,” “data reservoirs,” or “data refineries” on anything but Hadoop or NoSQL.
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James Kobielus is an industry veteran and serves as IBM Big Data Evangelist; Senior Program Director for Product Marketing in Big Data Analytics; and Team Lead, Technical Marketing, IBM Big Data & Analytics Hub. He spearheads thought leadership activities across the IBM Analytics solution portfolio. He has spoken at such leading industry events as IBM Insight, Hadoop Summit, and Strata. He has published several business technology books and is a very popular provider of original commentary on blogs and many social media.
Resources
– Master of Information and Data Science, UC Berkeley School of Information.
– MS in Data Science, NYU Center for Data Science.
– Free data science curriculum, kdnuggets.com
– Master of Science in Data Science – Data Science Institute
–Data Mining and Applications Graduate Certificate, Stanford
–The European Data Science Academy (EDSA) designs curricula for data science training and data science education across the European Union (EU).
-The EDISON project will focus on activities to establish the new profession of ‘Data Scientist’, following the emergence of Data Science technologies (also referred to as Data Intensive or Big Data technologies) which changes the way research is done, how scientists think and how the research data are used and shared. This includes definition of the required skills, competences framework/profile, corresponding Body Of Knowledge and model curriculum. It will develop a sustainability/business model to ensure a sustainable increase of Data Scientists, graduated from universities and trained by other professional education and training institutions in Europe.
EDISON will facilitate the establishment of a Data Science education and training infrastructure at major European universities by promoting experience of ‘champion’ universities involving them into coordinated development and implementation of the model curriculum and creation of cooperative educational and training infrastructure.
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