The Democratization of Machine Learning Features

Abstract

In the Machine Age, Machine learning (ML) becomes a secret sauce to success for any business. Machine learning applications are not limited to autonomous cars or robotics but are widely used in almost all sectors including finance, healthcare, entertainment, government systems, telecommunications, and many others. Due to a lack of enterprise ML strategy, many enterprises still repeat the tedious steps and spend most of the time massaging the required data. It is easier to access a variety of data because of big data lakes and data democratization. Despite it and decent advances in ML, engineers still spend significant time in data cleansing and feature engineering. Most of the steps are often repeated in this exercise. As a result, it generates identical features with variations that lead to inconsistent results in testing and training ML applications. It often stretches the time to go-live and increases the number of iterations to ship a final ML application. Sharing the best practices and best features are not only time-savers but they also help to jumpstart ML application development. The democratization of ML features is a powerful way to share useful features, to reduce time go-live, and to enable rapid ML application development. It is one of the emerging trends in enterprise ML application development and this paper presents details about a way to achieve ML feature democratization.