1. 4/23/13
Movie Night: Data Science
- Even On Our Night Off
May 27, 2014

2. Anqi and Irene – (H2O)
• Anqi is the in-house R expert and is responsible for K-means and PCA
• Irene is the pencil and paper stats nerd and technical writer
• Part of a data science team that’s 75% women, and on a technical team that’s
23% women (well above average).
Sergei- (Collective) VP, Data Sciences at Collective, where he is
responsible for the architecture, development and scaling of data-driven
technology products for digital advertising.

3. What is H2O?
• Same statistics - new volumes of data
• On a distributed cluster models on a terabyte of data can finish in
minutes.
• Provide an interface to give more people the power of data science.
• Also hook H2O into R and Scala

4. Overview
Walk through the practical problem of what movie to go see
together.
Examine work flow from data to prediction, and let the best
model inform our choice
Extend to production setting applications with a customer use
case

5. Movie Lens Data
Data is the 100,000 observation MovieLens data set
Demographic Features:
State Age Occupation Gender
Factor Integer Factor Factor
Levels: 62 Range
(7,73)
Levels: 21 Levels: 2
Largest class:
California
Mean: 32.9 Largest Class:
Student
M:F is about
3:1

6. Movie Classes
Movies are classified by types, types are not exclusive.

7. Dependent Variable
Users rated movies on a Likert scale of 1 to 5.
We converted this to a binomial indicator:
Ratings >= 4: recoded to 1, indicating liked movie
Ratings < 4: recoded to 0, indicating disliked the movie

8. Super Models
Both models are predicting the same dependent variable as a function
of the same set of features.
First model with tree based GBM - start simple and let the model get
as complex as it needs to with depth
Alternative model with regularized GLM - start with complexity
and let model generalize with regularization

9. WWIM
Using Gradient Boosted Classification on two classes
GBM is nonparametric, great when there’s no theoretical
model.
Accounts for complex interaction
Control overfitting with learning rate

10. WWAM: Alternative – Logistic GLM
Logistic binomial regression
End model has interpretability
Control for overfitting introducing penalty into objective
function - aids in feature selection and generalizability
Ridge regression- all L2 Penalty

11. Rubber; Meet Road
Comparison of error rates on holdout set
GBM Model GLM Model
Error on Dislike (0) 28% 30%
Error on Like (1) 18% 50%
Overall 22% 40%

12. GBM Predictions GLM Predictions
Like: 300, Her, Need For Speed
Dislike: Frozen, Pebody
Like: 300, Her, Capt. America
Dislike: Frozen, Divergent

13. Lights Out - Some Closing
Points
We didn't address a serious problem here - but this is the
general process used in a production environment.
To give you a sense for the real world implementation, we’ve
asked one of our users to share his use case with you.

14. Stories change people, while statistics gives
them something to argue about
- Bernie Siegel

15. Ad Server
(publisher)
Ad Server
(advertiser)
AgencyBrowser
BrandsPublishers
Content
Inventory
Ads
Audience

16. Audience Modeling
1. Build the Audience Cloud of stable cookies.
2. Define target audience using Cookie level data.
3. Assemble 1,000s of features on every cookie.
4. Build a predictive model using machine learning.
5. Score every cookie in the Audience Cloud.
6. Create a targetable segment with the top X users.
7. Adjust X daily to optimize delivery & performance.
8. Rebuild models weekly (daily if warranted).
Audience Cloud
(200M+ Stable Cookies)
Target Audience
(100K Cookies)
1M Cookies
3M Cookies
bit.ly/MLatScale
Preprint of paper submitted to KDD’14
Audience Extension: audiences (age 25-40, buys toys, watches TNT)
Audience Optimization: actions (clicks, online purchases)

17. Modeling Platform
MODEL BUILDING
Computing predictive models
on
Current Future
DATA SIZES
Size of data
ALGORITHM
Complexity and performance
GBMglmnet
1 million
1,000
1 billion
100,000
SCORING
Predicting outcomes
Batch
Real
Time
+ H2O