Fighting Fraud with Machine Learning at Shopify with Solmaz Shahalizadeh

The podcast you're about to hear is the first of a series of shows recorded at the Georgian Partners Portfolio Conference last week in Toronto. My guest for this show is Solmaz Shahalizadeh, Director of Merchant Services Algorithms at Shopify. Solmaz gave a great talk at the GPPC focused on her team's experiences applying machine learning to fight fraud and improve merchant satisfaction. Solmaz and I dig into, step-by-step, the process they used to transition from a legacy, rules-based fraud detection system system to a more scalable, flexible one based on machine learning models. We discuss the importance of well-defined project scope; tips and traps when selecting features to train your models; and the various models, transformations and pipelines the Shopify team selected; and how they use PMML to make their Python models available to their Ruby-on-Rails web application.