Best Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms

What are data science and machine learning (DSML) platforms?

Types of DSML platforms

What are the common features of data science and machine learning solutions?

What are the benefits of using DSML engineering platforms?

Through the use of data science and machine learning platforms, data scientists can gain visibility into the entire data journey, from ingestion to inference. This helps them better understand what is and isn’t working and provides them with the tools necessary to fix problems if and when they arise. With these tools, experts prepare and enrich their data, leverage machine learning libraries, and deploy their algorithms into production.

Share data insights: Users can share data, models, dashboards, or other related information with collaboration-based tools to foster and facilitate teamwork.

Simplify and scale data science: Many platforms are opening up these tools to a broader audience with easy-to-use features and drag-and-drop capabilities. In addition, pre-trained models and out-of-the-box pipelines tailored to specific tasks help streamline the process. These platforms easily help scale up experiments across many nodes to perform distributed training on large datasets.

Experimentation: Before a model is pushed to production, data scientists spend a significant amount of time working with the data and experimenting to find an optimal solution. Data science and machine learning vendors facilitate this experimentation through data visualization, data augmentation, and data preparation tools. Different types of layers and optimizers for deep learning, which are algorithms or methods used to change the attributes of neural networks, such as weights and learning rate, to reduce losses, are also used in experimentation.

Who uses data science and machine learning products?

Data scientists are in high demand, but skilled professionals are in shortage. The skillset is varied and vast (for example, there is a need to understand various algorithms, advanced mathematics, programming skills, and more). Therefore, such professionals are difficult to come by and command high compensation. To tackle this issue, platforms increasingly include features that make it easier to develop AI solutions, such as drag-and-drop capabilities and prebuilt algorithms.

In addition, for data science projects to initiate, it is key that the broader business buys into them. The more robust platforms provide resources that help nontechnical users understand the models, the data involved, and the aspects of the business that have been impacted.

Data engineers: With robust data integration capabilities, data engineers tasked with the design, integration, and management of data use these platforms to collaborate with data scientists and other stakeholders within the organization.

Citizen data scientists: With the rise of more user-friendly features, citizen data scientists, who are not professionally trained but have developed data skills, are increasingly turning to data science and machine learning platforms to bring AI into their organizations.

Professional data scientists: Expert data scientists use these solutions to scale data science operations across the lifecycle, simplifying the process of experimentation to deployment and speeding up data exploration and preparation, as well as model development and training.

Business stakeholders: Business stakeholders use these tools to gain clarity into the machine learning models and better understand how they tie in with the broader business and its operations.

What are the alternatives to data science and machine learning platforms?

Alternatives to data science and machine learning solutions can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:

AI & machine learning operationalization software: Depending on the use case, businesses might consider AI and machine learning operationalization software. This software does not provide a platform for the full end-to-end development of machine learning models but can provide more robust features around operationalizing these algorithms. This includes monitoring the health, performance, and accuracy of models.

Machine learning software: Data science and machine learning platforms are great for the full-scale development of models, whether that be for computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), and more. However, in some cases, businesses may want a solution that is more readily available off the shelf, which they can use in a plug-and-play fashion. In such a case, they can consider machine learning software, which will involve less setup time and development costs.

There are many different types of machine learning algorithms that perform a variety of tasks and functions. These algorithms may consist of more specific ones, such as association rule learning, Bayesian networks, clustering, decision tree learning, genetic algorithms, learning classifier systems, and support vector machines, among others. This helps organizations look for point solutions.

Software and services related to data science and machine learning engineering platforms

Related solutions that can be used together with DSML platforms include:

Data preparation software: Data preparation software helps companies with their data management. These solutions allow users to discover, combine, clean, and enrich data for simple analysis. Although data science and machine learning platforms offer data preparation features, businesses might opt for a dedicated preparation tool.

Data warehouse software: Most companies have many disparate data sources, and to best integrate all their data, they implement a data warehouse. Data warehouses house data from multiple databases and business applications, which allows business intelligence and analytics tools to pull all company data from a single repository. This organization is critical to the quality of the data ingested by data science and machine learning platforms.

Data labeling software: To achieve supervised learning off the ground, it is key to have labeled data. Putting in place a systematic, sustained labeling effort can be aided by data labeling software, which provides a toolset for businesses to turn unlabeled data into labeled data and build corresponding AI algorithms.

Natural language processing (NLP) software: NLP allows applications to interact with human language using a deep learning algorithm. NLP algorithms input language and give a variety of outputs based on the learned task. NLP algorithms provide voice recognition and natural language generation (NLG), which converts data into understandable human language. Some examples of NLP uses include chatbots, translation applications, and social media monitoring tools that scan social media networks for mentions.

Challenges with DSML platforms

Software solutions can come with their own set of challenges. 

Data requirements: A great deal of data is required for most AI algorithms to learn what is needed. Users need to train machine learning algorithms using techniques such as reinforcement learning, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning to build a truly intelligent application.

Skill shortage: There is also a shortage of people who understand how to build these algorithms and train them to perform the necessary actions. The common user cannot simply fire up AI software and have it solve all their problems.

Algorithmic bias: Although the technology is efficient, it is not always effective and is marred by various types of biases in the training data, such as race or gender biases. For example, since many facial recognition algorithms are trained on datasets with primarily white male faces, others are more likely to be falsely identified by the systems.

Which companies should buy DSML engineering platforms?

The implementation of AI can have a positive impact on businesses across a host of different industries. Here are a handful of examples:

Financial services: AI is widely used in financial services, with banks using it for everything from developing credit score algorithms to analyzing earnings documents to spot trends. With data science and machine learning software solutions, data science teams can build models with company data and deploy them to internal and external applications.

Healthcare: Within healthcare, businesses can use these platforms to better understand patient populations, such as predicting in-patient visits and developing systems that can match people with relevant clinical trials. In addition, as the process of drug discovery is particularly costly and takes a significant amount of time, healthcare organizations are using data science to speed up the process, using data from past trials, research papers, and more.

Retail: In retail, especially e-commerce, personalization rules supreme. The top retailers are leveraging these platforms to provide customers with highly personalized experiences based on factors such as previous behavior and location. With machine learning in place, these businesses can display highly relevant material and catch the attention of potential customers. 

How to choose the best data science and machine learning (DSML) platform

Requirements gathering (RFI/RFP) for DSML platforms

If a company is just starting out and looking to purchase its first data science and machine learning platform, or wherever a business is in its buying process, g2.com can help select the best option.

The first step in the buying process must involve a careful look at one’s company data. As a fundamental part of the data science journey involves data engineering (i.e., data collection and analysis), businesses must ensure that their data quality is high and the platform in question can adequately handle their data, both in terms of format as well as volume. If the company has amassed a lot of data, it needs to look for a solution that can grow with the organization. Users should think about the pain points and jot them down; these should be used to help create a checklist of criteria. Additionally, the buyer must determine the number of employees who will need to use this software, as this drives the number of licenses they are likely to buy.

Taking a holistic overview of the business and identifying pain points can help the team springboard into creating a checklist of criteria. The checklist serves as a detailed guide that includes both necessary and nice-to-have features, including budget, features, number of users, integrations, security requirements, cloud or on-premises solutions, and more.

Depending on the deployment scope, producing an RFI, a one-page list with a few bullet points describing what is needed from a data science platform might be helpful.

Compare DSML products

Create a long list

From meeting the business functionality needs to implementation, vendor evaluations are an essential part of the software buying process. For ease of comparison, after all demos are complete, it helps to prepare a consistent list of questions regarding specific needs and concerns to ask each vendor.

Create a short list

From the long list of vendors, it is helpful to narrow down the list of vendors and come up with a shorter list of contenders, preferably no more than three to five. With this list in hand, businesses can produce a matrix to compare the features and pricing of the various solutions.

Conduct demos

To ensure a thorough comparison, the user should demo each solution on the short list using the same use case and datasets. This will allow the business to evaluate like-for-like and see how each vendor compares against the competition.

Selection of DSML platforms

Choose a selection team

Before getting started, it's crucial to create a winning team that will work together throughout the entire process, from identifying pain points to implementation. The software selection team should consist of members of the organization who have the right interests, skills, and time to participate in this process. A good starting point is to aim for three to five people who fill roles such as the main decision maker, project manager, process owner, system owner, or staffing subject matter expert, as well as a technical lead, IT administrator, or security administrator. In smaller companies, the vendor selection team may be smaller, with fewer participants, multitasking, and taking on more responsibilities.

Negotiation

Just because something is written on a company’s pricing page does not mean it is fixed (although some companies will not budge). It is imperative to open up a conversation regarding pricing and licensing. For example, the vendor may be willing to give a discount for multi-year contracts or to recommend the product to others.

Final decision

After this stage, and before going all in, it is recommended to roll out a test run or pilot program to test adoption with a small sample size of users. If the tool is well used and well received, the buyer can be confident that the selection was correct. If not, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

Cost of data science and machine learning platforms

As mentioned above, data science and machine learning platforms are available as both on-premises and cloud solutions. Pricing between the two might differ, with the former often requiring more upfront infrastructure costs. 

As with any software, these platforms are frequently available in different tiers, with the more entry-level solutions costing less than the enterprise-scale ones. The former will frequently not have as many features and may have usage caps. DSML vendors may have tiered pricing, in which the price is tailored to the users’ company size, the number of users, or both. This pricing strategy may come with some degree of support, which might be unlimited or capped at a certain number of hours per billing cycle.

Once set up, they do not often require significant maintenance costs, especially if deployed in the cloud. As these platforms often come with many additional features, businesses looking to maximize the value of their software can contract third-party consultants to help them derive insights from their data and get the most out of the software.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Businesses decide to deploy data science and machine learning platforms with the goal of deriving some degree of ROI. As they are looking to recoup the losses that they spent on the software, it is critical to understand the costs associated with it. As mentioned above, these platforms typically are billed per user, which is sometimes tiered depending on the company size. More users will typically translate into more licenses, which means more money.

Users must consider how much is spent and compare that to what is gained, both in terms of efficiency as well as revenue. Therefore, businesses can compare processes between pre- and post-deployment of the software to better understand how processes have been improved and how much time has been saved. They can even produce a case study (either for internal or external purposes) to demonstrate the gains they have seen from their use of the platform.

Implementation of data science and machine learning platforms

How are DSML software tools implemented?

Implementation differs drastically depending on the complexity and scale of the data. In organizations with vast amounts of data in disparate sources (e.g., applications, databases, etc.), it is often wise to utilize an external party, whether that be an implementation specialist from the vendor or a third-party consultancy. With vast experience under their belts, they can help businesses understand how to connect and consolidate their data sources and how to use the software efficiently and effectively.

Who is responsible for DSML platform implementation?

It may require many people or teams to properly deploy a data science platform, including data engineers, data scientists, and software engineers. This is because, as mentioned, data can cut across teams and functions. As a result, one person or even one team rarely has a full understanding of all of a company’s data assets. With a cross-functional team in place, a business can begin to piece together its data and begin the journey of data science, starting with proper data preparation and management.

What is the implementation process for data science and machine learning products?

In terms of implementation, it is typical for the platform to be deployed in a limited fashion and subsequently rolled out in a broader fashion. For example, a retail brand might decide to A/B test its use of a personalization algorithm for a limited number of visitors to its site to understand better how it is performing. If the deployment is successful, the data science team can present their findings to their leadership team (which might be the CTO, depending on the structure of the business).

If the deployment is unsuccessful, the team can return to the drawing board to determine what went wrong. This will involve examining the training data and algorithms used. If they try again, yet nothing seems to be successful (i.e., the outcome is faulty or there is no improvement in predictions), the business might need to go back to basics and review their data.

When should you implement DSML tools?

As previously mentioned, data engineering, which involves preparing and gathering data, is a fundamental feature of data science projects. Therefore, businesses must make getting their data in order their top priority, ensuring that there are no duplicate records or misaligned fields. Although this sounds basic, it is anything but. Faulty data as an input will result in faulty data as an output. 

Data science and machine learning platforms trends

AutoML

AutoML helps automate many tasks needed to develop AI and machine learning applications. Uses include automatic data preparation, automated feature engineering, providing explainability for models, and more.

Embedded AI

Machine and deep learning functionality is getting increasingly embedded in nearly all types of software, irrespective of whether the user is aware of it. Using embedded AI inside software like CRM, marketing automation, and analytics solutions allows us to streamline processes, automate certain tasks, and gain a competitive edge with predictive capabilities. Embedded AI may gradually pick up in the coming years and may do so in the same way cloud deployment and mobile capabilities have over the past decade. Eventually, vendors may not need to highlight their product benefits from machine learning as it may just be assumed and expected.

Machine learning as a service (MLaaS)

The software environment has moved to a more granular microservices structure, particularly for development operations needs. Additionally, the boom of public cloud infrastructure services has allowed large companies to offer development and infrastructure services to other businesses with a pay-as-you-use model. AI software is no different, as the same companies provide MLaaS for other enterprises.

Developers quickly take advantage of these prebuilt algorithms and solutions by feeding them their data to gain insights. Using systems built by enterprise companies helps small businesses save time, resources, and money by eliminating the need to hire skilled machine learning developers. MLaaS will grow further as companies continue to rely on these microservices and the need for AI increases.

Explainability

When it comes to machine learning algorithms, especially deep learning, it may be difficult to explain how they arrived at certain conclusions. Explainable AI, also known as XAI, is the process whereby the decision-making process of algorithms is made transparent and understandable to humans. Transparency is the most prevalent principle in the current AI ethics literature, and hence explainability, a subset of transparency, becomes crucial. Data science and machine learning platforms are increasingly including tools for explainability, which helps users build explainability into their models and help them meet data explainability requirements in legislation such as the European Union's privacy law and the GDPR.