1.2.2 Define Business Goals

The first phase of machine learning process is to define business objectives. This initial phase of a project focuses on understanding the project objectives and requirements.

Once you have specified the problem from a business perspective, you can formulate it as a machine learning problem and develop a preliminary implementation plan. Identify success criteria to determine if the machine learning results meet the business goals defined. Machine learning can help solve problems provided that you have clear understanding of the business problem with enough data and learn to ask the right questions to obtain meaningful results. The patterns you find through machine learning may be very different depending on how you formulate the problem. For example, rather than trying to learn how to "improve the response to a direct mail campaign," you might try to find the characteristics of people who have responded to your campaigns in the past. You can then classify if a given profile of a prospect would respond to a direct email campaign.

Another example, your business problem might be: "How can I sell more of my product to customers?" You might translate this into a machine learning problem such as: "Which customers are most likely to purchase the product?" A model that predicts who is most likely to purchase the product is typically built on data that describes the customers who have purchased the product in the past.

To summarize, in this phase, you will:

• Specify objectives
• Determine machine learning goals
• Define success criteria
• Produce project plan