Show HN: Machine Learning for Google Sheets (opens in new tab)

I like to say "the dollars are in the data". Tools like these do open up ML to a wider audience but it does nothing for them to understand that nothing beats proper record keeping and data collection. Furthermore, it handicaps you in certain ways. For example, how are missing values handled?

Totally understand your mixed feelings. We are trying to do as many standard data preprocessing steps as we can (cleaning, normalizing, one-hot encoding etc.) and are now switching over to an AutoML engine. We basically see the outputs of Magicsheets as great baseline models, Data Scientists could definitely do better (especially with domain knowledge) but we should at least be able to give some useful predictions back for most problems :).

> I’m guessing the people who can’t pipe a csv to pandas + scikit

People who know how to do that neglect the important steps too. The hardest part about ML is finding practitioners who aren't false positives.

Hi Nalta! Thank you for your advice. We noticed that indeed most spreadsheet users do not do well with ML logic - as they are used to Excel functions, which have an input -> output structure (not validation cycles, hyperparam optimization etc.). We are building an AutoML engine, exactly for this reason - to indeed take everything "ML" away for spreadsheet users. Our ultimate goal is to turn ML literally into an Excel function. Super challenging problem, but really exciting at the same time :).

A significant amount of ML work is done in Excel with more on the way. For example, see the book "Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight" by John W. Foreman.

There oughtta be a "law" about this; something like "Every software system eventually has an Excel implementation" or such.

Thanks for the insight! We expect to keep the Google Sheets add-on free for the near future. For our business model, we are instead focusing on building fully end-to-end pipelines that use the same ML engine as for the Google Sheets add-on:

Data integration -> ML Predictions -> taking actions.

As an example, for an ecommerce store we plug into their Shopify, predict people likely to churn and send them a Mailchimp discount code.

We are running pilot projects now for these pipelines, so if you are interested do not hesitate to reach out to me on jan [at] magicsheets [dot] io

Hi there, thanks for the kind words and advice! Our next step is building an AutoML engine that indeed takes algorithm selection and hyperparameter choice out of the hands of inexperienced users.