In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Ira Cohen, co-founder and chief data scientist at Anodot (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Anodot). Since my days in quantitative finance, I’ve had a longstanding interest in time-series analysis. Back then, I used statistical (and data mining) techniques on relatively small volumes of financial time series. Today’s applications and use cases involve data volumes and speeds that require a new set of tools for data management, collection, and simple analysis.

On the analytics side, applications are also beginning to require online machine learning algorithms that are able to scale, are adaptive, and free of a rigid dependence on labeled data. I talked with Cohen about the challenges in building an advanced analytics system for intelligent applications at extremely large scale.

Semi-Supervised, Unsupervised, and Adaptive Algorithms for Large-Scale Time Series

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Semi-Supervised, Unsupervised, and Adaptive Algorithms for Large-Scale Time Series

O'Reilly Radar