DataRobot Blog

One of my favorite things about Chinese culture is going out with friends and family for dim sum on the weekend. Dim sum is prepared as small bite-sized portions of food served in small steamer baskets or on small plates. Dim sum dishes are served for brunch or lunch. In my hometown, dim sum is also known as yum cha,…

One of my friends is a fashion designer. When he sees me doing mathematics, he feels bored because mathematics is not his favorite subject - he prefers creative pursuits such as art. And he’s not alone. An AP-AOL news poll found that mathematics was the subject that 37% of Americans hated most during their school days, easily ranking as the…

Imagine you are hiring a new staff member who will decide which personal loan applications a bank will accept and which it will not. So far, the interview is going well. You’ve asked the applicant which data fields are most important and they’ve answered income, credit rating and amount of the loan. Next, you ask them which credit rating values…

Have you ever been guilty of confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories? Let’s admit it. We have all been guilty of this cognitive bias, even those of us who like to think that we are data-driven. At Gartner's 2016 "BI Bake-Off" at the Data and Analytics Summit in Dallas, Texas,…

The first time I took my driving test, I failed. The driving examiner said that I had very good car control, but that I failed because I didn’t use my handbrake during a hill start. Even though my hill start went well, the instructor didn’t trust that it would always go so well unless I always used the handbrake. The…

When you hire a new employee you don’t just interview one job applicant. You invite several of the job applicants for interviews and you seek to find the highest performer, the one with the best credentials, the one with a solid track record of job performance. Well, it’s the same when you want to put an artificial intelligence (AI) into production. You…

We are entering the era of the AI-driven enterprise, but AI will only be accepted into organizations if it is trusted. In 2016, when AI was dominated by black box technologies, thought leader Thomas Davenport predicted that:   “Humans will want to know how ... technologies came up with their decision or recommendation. If they can’t get into the black…

We heard in the news that “Amazon built an AI tool to hire people but had to shut it down because it was discriminating against women.” This isn’t the first time this type of problem was reported, and it won’t be the last since biased systems are a common trap companies can easily fall into. “It’s important that we be…

Colin Priest, Senior Director of Product Marketing, answers a very important question in our next installment of the AI Simplified video series: How can you trust an AI? When choosing an AI, you want to trust that it can make the right decisions to solve your business problems. Colin’s approach to this is by treating the AI just as you…