In November I was fortunate to have the opportunity to present at PyCon AU in Melbourne, Australia. I was really excited to give a talk about why data scientists should be aware of the kinds of problems mathematical optimisation was really good at solving.
The recording of my presentation is below, but a few of my main points were:
- There are three forms of analytics:
- Descriptive
- Predictive
- Prescriptive
- Machine learning falls into the predictive category, whereas mathematical optimisation falls into the prescriptive analytics category.
- Machine learning and mathematical optimisation are enormously complementary – you’ll often take the predictions of a machine learning model and use them as the inputs to a mathematical optimisation which will tell you the optimal decisions you should make, while subject to constraints.