AI Should not Leave Structured Data Behind!

AI and deep learning have been shining in dealing with unstructured data, from natural language understanding and automatic knowledge base construction to classifying and generating images and videos. Structured data, however, which is trapped in business applications such as product repositories, transaction logs, ERP and CRM systems are being left behind! Tabular data is still being processed by an older generation of data science techniques, like rule-based systems or decision trees. These methods use handcrafted features, are tedious to maintain, and require lots of manually labelled data. While the recent advancement of AI advances allowed mining huge value out of unstructured data, it would be remiss to not pay the same attention to the value of structured data in driving business, revenues, health, security and even governance.