Steampunk Machine Learning

Abstract

Fitting models to data is all the rage nowadays but has long been an essential skill of engineers. Veterans know that real-world systems foil textbook techniques by interleaving routine operating conditions with bouts of overload and failure; to be practical, a method must model the former without distortion by the latter. Surprisingly effective aid comes from an unlikely quarter: a simple and intuitive model-fitting approach that predates the Babbage Engine. The foundation of industrial-strength decision support and anomaly detection for production datacenters, this approach yields accurate yet intelligible models without hand-holding or fuss. It is easy to practice with modern analytics software and is widely applicable to computing systems and beyond.