Researchers at MIT have developed a new artificial intelligence system that is able to outperform even the smartest human intuition in a number of different areas.
The new big data analysis system aims to be able to replace human intuition, searching for buried patterns. The system is called the Data Science Machine, and outperformed human teams in three data science competitions.
The Data Science Machine was able to make predictions that were 94, 96 and 87 percent as accurate as the best submissions in the competitions, and performed better than 615 out of the 906 teams that participated in the competition.
"We view the Data Science Machine as a natural complement to human intelligence," said Max Kanter, who wrote a master's thesis in computer science, which became the basis of the new Data Science Machine. "There's so much data out there to be analyzed. And right now it's just sitting there not doing anything. So maybe we can come up with a solution that will at least get us started on it, at least get us moving."
What's astounding is that the machine was able to outperform not only the human teams, but also the rate at which it did this. While human teams worked on their algorithms for a number of months, the machine completed its algorithms between 2 hours and 12 hours.
The machine itself is basically able to track correlations in relationships that are built using numerical indicators. As those indicators appear, the machine applies operations to find averages in the numbers. The machine also looks for categorical data.
Examples of the data that the machine could analyze include things like the products a person would be apt to purchase or the likelihood of a particular student dropping out of a class.
