Why Companies are in Need of Data Lineage Solutions

O'Reilly Radar

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Neelesh Salian, software engineer at Stitch Fix, a company that combines machine learning and human expertise to personalize shopping. As companies integrate machine learning into their products and systems, there are important foundational technologies that come into play. This shouldn’t come as a shock, as current machine learning and AI technologies require large amounts of data—specifically, labeled data for training models. There are also many other considerations—including security, privacy, reliability/safety—that are encouraging companies to invest in a suite of data technologies. In conversations with data engineers, data scientists, and AI researchers, the need for solutions that can help track data lineage and provenance keeps popping up. There are several San Francisco Bay Area companies that have embarked on building data lineage systems—including Salian and his colleagues at Stitch Fix. I wanted to find out how they arrived at the decision to build such a system and what capabilities they are building into it.