Using Apache Spark Machine Learning for Pattern Detection - RTInsights

As Oracle recounts, Apache Spark excels at running machine learning queries on massive data sets. Predicting consumer behavior is considered the holy grail of marketing, but a classic problem is filtering out the noise from customers who are ready to buy. Web activity such as search and browsing may generate petabytes of data, then there's past-purchase history and offline behavior such as in-store purchases. Then there's reams of demographic data to analyze -- age, income, affinities -- in search of the coveted target market. Alexander Sadovsky, director of data science at Oracle, runs a team responsible for crunching data on audience behavior and advertising across different channels, whether Google, Facebook, the wider internet, or in stores.