The Importance of Predictive Maintenance: Using AI to Increase Operational Efficiency

Tuesday of this past week was quite fortuitous: In my Data Science Cohort at Lambda School, we are working a predictive maintenance competition on Kaggle regarding Water pumps in Tanzania. And, I went to a Data Science networking event at a defense contractor who spoke of the importance of Predictive Maintenance Solutions -- in their case, they were predicting the failure rates of parts of the F35 Joint Strike Fighter. According to IoT world, The Predictive Maintenance report forecasts a compound annual growth rate for Predictive Maintenance of 39% between 2016–2022, with annual technology spending reaching US$10.96 This has a large positive impact on Data Science and Machine Learning if the industry can keep up with the needs of predictive maintenance problems. What is predictive maintenance and why is it so important to different domains?