Hi ,
Recently, Australia's largest airline, Qantas, has been making news for all the wrong reasons.
After years of delivering record shareholder profits, the extreme cost-cutting measures employed to do so finally caught up with the airline - resulting in consumer trust in Qantas plummeting and the resignation of CEO Alan Joyce.
In optimizing Qantas's short-term profits, Joyce neglected the customers who are the ultimate source of those profits, causing damage to Qantas's reputation that will probably take years and vast sums of money to restore.
Qantas traded
it's long-term profits for short-term gain.
Here's the thing...
Optimization is at
the heart of most machine learning algorithms and data scientists are taught to select models that optimize their evaluation metric of choice.
Yet, data science is also all about trade-offs.
In maximizing one metric, it's often the case that we're doing so at the expense of another.
That doesn't mean you should avoid optimization.
Rather, if you're going to take an optimization approach, make sure you understand what it is you're optimizing and what it's truly going to cost.
Talk again soon,
Dr Genevieve Hayes.
