A Cautionary Tale for Machine Learning Design: why we Still Need Human-Assisted Big Data Analysis

Supervised Machine Learning (ML) requires that smart algorithms scrutinize a very large number of labeled samples before they can make right predictions. And this is not always true either. In our experience, in fact, a neural network trained with a huge database comprised of over fifteen million water meter readings had essentially failed to predict when a meter would malfunction/need disassembly based on a history of water consumption measurements.