Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

(1998). Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic studies. Gifted and Talented International: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 97-98.

Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic studies

https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/bitstream/10197/7168/1/WP15_20.pdf

Bitcoin, gold and the dollar – A GARCH volatility analysis

Since decades, the financial industry has experienced a continuous evolution in service delivery due to digitalization. This evolution is characterized by expanded connectivity and enhanced speed of information processing both at the customer interface and in back-office processes. Recently, there has been a shift in the focus of digitalization from improving the delivery of traditional tasks to introducing fundamentally new business opportunities and models for financial service companies. Digital Finance encompasses a magnitude of new financial products, financial businesses, finance-related software, and novel forms of customer communication and interaction—delivered by FinTech companies and innovative financial service providers. Against this backdrop, the research on finance and information systems has started to analyze these changes and the impact of digital progress on the financial sector. Therefore, this article reviews the current state of research in Digital Finance that deals with these novel and innovative business functions. Moreover, it gives an outlook on potential future research directions. As a conceptual basis for reviewing this field, the Digital Finance Cube, which embraces three key dimensions of Digital Finance and FinTech, i.e., the respective business functions, the technologies and technological concepts applied as well as the institutions concerned, is introduced. This conceptualization supports researchers and practitioners when orientating in the field of Digital Finance, allows for the arrangement of academic research relatively to each other, and enables for the revelation of the gaps in research.

Digital Finance and FinTech: current research and future research directions

Digital currencies are a globally spreading phenomenon that is frequently and also prominently addressed by media, venture capitalists, financial and governmental institutions alike. As exchange prices for Bitcoin have reached multiple peaks within 2013, we pose a prevailing and yet academically unaddressed question: What are users' intentions when changing their domestic into a digital currency? In particular, this paper aims at giving empirical insights on whether users’ interest regarding digital currencies is driven by its appeal as an asset or as a currency. Based on our evaluation, we find strong indications that especially uninformed users approaching digital currencies are not primarily interested in an alternative transaction system but seek to participate in an alternative investment vehicle.

Bitcoin - Asset or Currency? Revealing Users' Hidden Intentions

Online reviews provide information about products and services valuable for consumers in the context of purchase decision making. Online reviews also provide additional value to online retailers, as they attract consumers. Therefore, identifying the most-helpful reviews is an important task for online retailers. This research addresses the problem of predicting the helpfulness of online product reviews by developing a comprehensive research model guided by the theoretical foundations of signaling theory. Thereby, our research model posits that the reviewer of a product sends signals to potential buyers. Using a sample of Amazon.com product reviews, we test our model and observe that review content-related signals (i.e., specific review content and writing styles) and reviewer-related signals (i.e., reviewer expertise and non-anonymity) both influence review helpfulness. Furthermore, we find that the signaling environment affects the signal impact and that incentives provided to reviewers influence the signals sent. To demonstrate the practical relevance of our results, we illustrate by means of a problem-specific evaluation scenario that our model provides superior predictions of review helpfulness compared to earlier approaches. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the proposed evaluation scenario provides deeper insights than classical performance metrics. Our findings are highly relevant for online retailers seeking to reduce information overload and consumers' search costs as well as for reviewers contributing online product reviews.

Explaining and predicting online review helpfulness: The role of content and reviewer-related signals

Consumer recommendations of products and services are important performance indicators for organizations to gain feedback on their offerings. Furthermore, they are important for prospective customers to learn from prior consumer experiences. In this study, we focus on user-generated content, in particular online reviews, to investigate which service aspects are evaluated by consumers and how these factors explain a consumer's recommendation. Further, we investigate how recommendations can be predicted automatically based on such user-driven responses. We disentangle the recommendation decision by performing explanatory and predictive analyses focusing on a sample of airline reviews. We identify core and augmented service aspects expressed in the online review. We then show that service aspect-specific sentiment indicators drive the decision to recommend an airline and that these factors can be incorporated in a predictive model using data mining techniques. We also find that the business model of an airline being reviewed, whether low cost or full service, is also an applicable consideration. Our results are highly relevant for practitioners to analyze and act on consumer feedback in a prompt manner, along with the ability of gaining a deeper understanding of the service from multiple aspects. Also, potential travelers can benefit from this approach by getting an aggregated view on service quality.

Disentangling consumer recommendations: Explaining and predicting airline recommendations based on online reviews

Crowdfunding platforms offer founders the possibility to collect funding for project realization. With the advent of these platforms, the risk of fraud has risen. Fraudulent founders provide inaccurate information or pretend interest toward a project. Within this study, we propose deception detection support mechanisms to address this novel type of Internet fraud. We analyze a sample of fraudulent and nonfraudulent projects published at a leading crowdfunding platform. We examine whether the analysis of dynamic communication during the funding period is valuable for identifying fraudulent behavior—apart from analyzing only the static information related to the project. We investigate whether content-based cues and linguistic cues are valuable for fraud detection. The selection of cues and the subsequent feature engineering is based on theories in areas of communication, psychology, and computational linguistics. Our results should be helpful to the stakeholders of crowdfunding platforms and resear...

Michael Siering

Papers

Digital Finance and FinTech: current research and future research directions

Bitcoin - Asset or Currency? Revealing Users' Hidden Intentions

Explaining and predicting online review helpfulness: The role of content and reviewer-related signals

Disentangling consumer recommendations: Explaining and predicting airline recommendations based on online reviews

Detecting Fraudulent Behavior on Crowdfunding Platforms: The Role of Linguistic and Content-Based Cues in Static and Dynamic Contexts