More than 2.14 billion global consumers are expected to buy goods and services online in 2021, according to Statista. That is up 29% from 1.66 billion digital customers just six years ago. This rapid change in shopping habits is driving retailers’ digital transformations and ever more advanced technologies. Many retailers have begun automating back office functions like claims processing, accounting and inventory management.

Though we’re living through a time of extraordinary innovation in GPU-accelerated machine learning, the latest research papers frequently (and prominently) feature algorithms that are decades, in certain cases 70 years old. Some might contend that many of these older methods fall into the camp of ‘statistical analysis’ rather than machine learning, and prefer to date the advent of the sector back only so far as 1957, with the invention of the Perceptron.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) systems have long been touted as the future of medicine. A patient can walk into a doctors office, and after a quick scan discover their risk for a variety of diseases, and be given information on how to prevent them from occurring. Patients suffering from diseases like cancer can have treatment decisions made by an AI that can optimize care and maximize likelihood of survival.