Predictive modeling is the art of building statistical models that forecast probabilities and trends of future events. In this tutorial, we focus on the best practice of predictive modeling in the big data era, with motivating examples across a range of business tasks and relevance products. We present an overview of how predictive modeling helps power and drive key business use cases. We introduce essential concepts and outline the state of the art in building end-to-end predictive modeling solutions. We will also discuss the challenges, key technologies, and lessons learned from our practice, including case studies of LinkedIn feed relevance and a platform for email response prediction. Moreover, we discuss some practical solutions of building predictive modeling platform to scale the modeling efforts for data scientists and analysts, and provide an overview of popular tools and platforms used across the industry.
LinkedIn Engineering @ KDD 2016