How do you estimate a machine learning project?
It can be difficult to provide a ballpark figure for machine learning solutions. Estimating your project depends on many factors, such as what challenges your company is trying to solve, what artificial intelligence solutions, software, or tools would best serve your company, what your expectations are in terms of accuracy, the suitability of your data, and more.
For a more definitive answer, get in touch, and one of our experts will talk you through suitable machine learning services and give you an estimate based on an analysis of your precise requirements.
What machine learning services does Netguru offer?
Netguru offers a variety of services, from data collection strategy to building a scalable machine learning infrastructure.
AI Design Sprint – rapidly validate your machine learning project
ML Processes Audit – verify your machine learning delivery processes
Data Quality Assessment – plan your data collection strategy
ML-Ops Transformation – build a scalable machine learning infrastructure
Data-Ops Transformation – build a scalable data infrastructure
When should we use machine learning?
Machine learning applications can bring you more clients, provide greater insights, increase sales, and reduce business costs. However, if not used properly, they may lead to customer outflow, money loss, and reputation damage.
Data is the key to success in machine learning and deep learning applications. In traditional software development, humans create computer systems, and machines simply follow these pre-programmed rules. Thus, the crucial part of the application is the algorithm inside.
There are hundreds of business applications for machine learning solutions. In general, they solve several types of problems. The main ones are:
Classification: Is this credit card transaction fraudulent or not? Is this email spam or not? Machine learning tools are great when you need to divide objects (for example, clients or products) into two or more pre-defined groups.
Clustering: ML models are used to find parallels between data points and divide objects into similar groups (clusters). Importantly, there is no need to define the groups in advance.
Regression: It's like a future prediction. On the basis of an input from a data set (usually historical data plus other factors), ML models estimate the most likely numeric value of a particular quantity. It could be anything, such as stock prices, consumer behavior, or wear and tear on a piece of equipment.
Dimensionality reduction: In an ocean of information, ML tools can choose which data is the most significant and how it can be summarised. In practice, it is applied in such fields as photo processing and text analysis.
Although machine learning solutions give businesses numerous new options, there are situations when it's better to stick with traditional software methods.
When are you better off avoiding ML solutions?
You don't have enough data: machine learning is designed to work with huge amounts of data If the training data set is too small, then the system's decisions will be biased.
Data is too noisy: "Noise" in ML is the irrelevant information in a data set. If there is too much of it, the computer might memorize noise.
You don't have much time (or money): Custom ML solutions can be time- and resource-intensive. First, data scientists need to prepare a data set (if they don't do it, see point no. 2). Then, the computer needs some time to learn. Then the IT team performs a test and adjusts the model. Then, the computer needs some time to learn again. IT performs another test and adjusts the model. The computer goes back to learning. The cycle repeats over and over again. As the time needed increases, this is reflected in the pricing of your project.
You have a simple problem to solve.
To sum up: Machine learning models help find patterns in the chaos of big data sets. It is worth considering when you have a complex task to solve or if you’re dealing with a large volume of data and lots of variables. But this method has its limits. It's better not to choose it if you are limited by time or the amount or quality of available data.
What are machine learning services?
Machine learning services are a type of artificial intelligence (AI) service that allow businesses to use sophisticated algorithms to learn from data and make predictions and recommendations.
Machine learning services can be used for a variety of purposes, such as predicting consumer behavior, increasing sales, improving customer service, and more. They work by using large amounts of data to "train" the algorithm, and then that algorithm can make predictions and recommendations based on what it has learned.
Can machine learning help to understand customers?
Yes, machine learning algorithms can help businesses to understand their customers in two main ways.
Firstly, machine learning can be used to analyze customer data in order to identify patterns and trends. This information can then be used to create customer profiles, which can help businesses to better understand what types of customers they have and what they might want or need.
Secondly, machine learning can be used to predict customer behavior. By analyzing past customer data, machine learning algorithms can learn how certain behaviors are likely to lead to specific outcomes (such as purchasing a product or signing up for a service).
This information can then be used to create predictive models that can help businesses to anticipate what customers will do in the future and thus optimize their marketing strategies accordingly.