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 a million dollars of previously undetected fraud on the very first day. This was a big eye-opener. In the years since, I have seen ML deliver huge value in diverse applications such as demand forecasting, failure and anomaly detection, ad targeting, online recommendations, and virtual assistants like Cortana. By embedding ML into their enterprise systems, organizations can improve customer experience, reduce the risk of systemic failures, grow revenue, and realize significant cost savings.
However, building ML systems is slow, time-consuming, and error prone. Even though we are able to analyze very large data sets these days and deploy at very high transaction rates, the following bottlenecks remain:
Data scientists work around these limitations by writing custom programs and by doing undifferentiated heavy lifting as they perform their ML experiments. But it gets harder in the deployment phase. Deploying ML models in a mission-critical business process such as real-time fraud prevention or ad targeting requires sophisticated engineering. The following needs must be met:
These are time-consuming and engineering-intensive steps, expensive in terms of both infrastructure and manpower. The end-to-end engineering and maintenance of a production ML application requires a highly skilled team that few organizations can build and sustain.
Microsoft Azure ML was designed to solve these problems.
Azure ML also makes it simple to create production deployments at scale in the cloud. Pretrained ML models can be incorporated into a scoring workflow and, with a few clicks, a new cloud-hosted REST API can be created. This REST API has been engineered to respond with low latency. No reimplementation or porting is required, which is a key benefit over traditional data analytics software. Data from anywhere on the Internet (laptops, websites, mobile devices, wearables, and connected machines) can be sent to the newly created API to get back predictions. For example, a data scientist can create a fraud detection API that takes transaction information as input and returns a low/medium/high risk indicator as output. Such an API would then be “live” on the cloud, ready to accept calls from any software that a developer chooses to call it from. The API backend scales elastically, so that when transaction rates spike, the Azure ML service can automatically handle the load. There are virtually no limits on the number of ML APIs that a data scientist can create and deploy–and all this without any dependency on engineering. For engineering and IT, it becomes simple to integrate a new ML model using those REST APIs, and testing multiple models side-by-side before deployment becomes easy, allowing dramatically better agility at low cost. Azure provides mechanisms to scale and manage APIs in production, including mechanisms to measure availability, latency, and performance. Building robust, highly available, reliable ML systems and managing the production deployment is therefore dramatically faster, cheaper, and easier for the enterprise, with huge business benefits.
We believe Azure ML is a game changer. It makes the incredible potential of ML accessible both to startups and large enterprises. Startups are now able to use the same capabilities that were previously available to only the most sophisticated businesses. Larger enterprises are able to unleash the latent value in their big data to generate significantly more revenue and efficiencies. Above all, the speed of iteration and experimentation that is now possible will allow for rapid innovation and pave the way for intelligence in cloud-connected devices all around us.
When I started my career in 1995, it took a large organization to build and deploy credit card fraud detection systems. With tools like Azure ML and the power of the cloud, a single talented data scientist can accomplish the same feat. The authors of this book, who have long experience with data science, have designed it to help you get started on this wonderful journey with Azure ML.
—Joseph Sirosh
Corporate Vice President,
Machine Learning, Microsoft Corporation
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