A Few More Ways Machine Learning Can Help You Know Your Customer - Tamr Inc.

You have probably experienced a simplified version of low-latency matching in action. When starting the checkout process at many popular online marketplaces you start typing your address, and the address bar starts showing suggestions to autocomplete your address, even if you have never shopped at the site before. This approach is low-latency, as the autofill suggestion shows up nearly-instantaneously, but it does not use any sophisticated matching on the back-end which means that a single-letter deviation from the correct street spelling will no longer yield the same suggestions. It is near-instantaneous for a reason – the entry that you started to type is matched one-to-one to existing records to find a match, and if no match is found, it simply shows nothing. This is where machine learning comes into play – allowing the more sophisticated matching to happen on the back-end, while still allowing near-instantaneous matching.