Joining the Dots using a Machine Learning Approach

In the space of literally a few weeks, I encountered a handful of interesting problems in the field that at first blush I considered to be edge cases but on closer inspection have determined are something that businesses do and have problems with, but consider dealing within a variety of ways. In one instance the problem is trying to determine the country from what is essentially an unstructured address using a lookup list of countries. The problem that needed to be solved is that you have data that is effectively a contiguous string of unstructured data and you want to determine perhaps the country from that data in order to either Address Match or filter your records. Most products that are used for data preparation will support being able to do this, but in this instance, I will use Experian's Aperture Data Studio to achieve the goal. A basic approach is to simply use an extract Matches function within the Transform step and derive the country to a new column using a transform.