bus math QRB501 wk1 qu-8

Business Math, Ch. 5

Heuristics in Artifical Intelligence & Machine Learning

  It seems that you have developed a "best practices" list for your future roll-outs.  In recent years, "best practices" has become a commonly used phrase.  I think what many people fail to grasp is that these "best practices" are lists that are based on data from historical experience.  In other words, we are using data to figure out how to do something better in the future.

Class, In my graduate field of Decision Sciences, we referred to this as "heuristics."  For any of you who are unfamiliar with this term, a heuristic is just a rule of thumb that you have developed through past experiences.  Here's how Webster defines it:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heuristic

With the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence, heuristics are used in everything from your car's accelerator to video games that you play.  Most cars today have a computer controlled accelerator that is not connected to anything in the car but the computer.  Data from the accelerator is used by the car's computer to determine how fast you want to go and how quickly you want to get to that velocity.

With video games, when you are playing against the game, data from your actions is processed to help the computer anticipate your future actions - much the way our own brain works.  Other examples of machine learning or forecasting based on historical data are the suggestions Amazon makes when you are making a purchase, the suggestions Netflix makes when you are choosing a movie, and the ads you see on Facebook.  Quantitative reasoning is everywhere!