13 Ways Machine Learning Can Steer You Wrong - InformationWeek

Succeeding in today's fast-paced business economy requires companies to harness data quickly and at scale. As the volume, velocity, and variety of data increase, it's becoming necessary to use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through all the incoming information, make sense of it, and accurately predict future business direction. It takes the right expertise, the right tools, and the right data to achieve the promise of machine learning. Even with all of those factors in place, it's still easy to get it wrong. "Machine learning gives us a very powerful set of techniques for making predictions, but it can also lead to disastrous results if you don't understand what your machine learning algorithm is doing," said Spencer Greenberg, a mathematician and founder of decision-making website ClearerThinking.org, in an interview.