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Objective-based data products

We are entering the era of data as drivetrain, where we use data not just to generate more data (in the form of predictions), but use data to produce ac-tionable outcomes. That is the goal of the Drivetrain Approach.

The best way to illustrate this process is with a familiar data product: search engines. Back in 1997, AltaVista was king of the algorithmic search world. While their mod- els were good at finding relevant websites, the answer the user was most in-terested in was often buried on page 100 of the search results. Then, Google came along and transformed online search by beginning with a simple question: What is the user's main objective in typing in a search query?

The four steps in the Drivetrain Approach.

Google realized that the objective was to show the most relevant search result; for other companies, it might be increasing profit, improving the customer experience, finding the best path for a robot, or balancing the load in a data center. Once we have specified the goal, the second step is to specify what inputs of the system we can control, the levers we can pull to influence the final outcome. In Google's case, they could control the ranking of the search results.

The third step was to consider what new data they would need to produce such a ranking; they realized that the implicit information regarding which pages linked to which other pages could be used for this purpose. Only after these first three steps do we begin thinking about building the predictive models. Our objective and available levers, what data we already have and what additional data we will need to collect, determine the models we can build. The models will take both the levers and any uncontrollable variables as their inputs; the outputs from the models can be combined to predict the final state for our objective.

Step 4 of the Drivetrain Approach for Google is now part of tech history: Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented the graph traversal algorithm PageRank and built an engine on top of it that revolutionized search. But you don't have to invent the next PageRank to build a great data product. We will show a sys-tematic approach to step 4 that doesn't require a PhD in computer science.

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Источник: Jeremy Howard, Margit Zwemer, and Mike Loukides. Designing Great Data Products. 2012

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