Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Machine learning and its application to online advertising

Farhat Habib

inMobi, Bangalore

Machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. Over the years, machine learning has found applications in diverse domains such as medical diagnostics, fraud detection, language translation, marketing and many others. There are machine learning algorithms behind the news we see, to the cars we drive, the medicines we take, and the products we purchase. The torrent of 'big data' from sources such as embedded sensors, digital cameras, click streams from social sites has enabled advances in machine learning as well as impacted our world with the fruits of machine learning on an unprecedented scale.

I will provide a background on how machine learning has developed over the years and some of the core algorithms as well as recent advances. I will briefly look at some of the connections between statistical physics and machine learning. I will cover the use of machine learning in targeted display advertising using signals from location, usage history, demographics, trends, or other second-order activities which serve as a proxy for these traits.