Combining Operations Research (OR) and Machine Learning (ML)

If you are an active resident of analytics land, you know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools are the new bosses in town. Every tool, technology, and technology solution around you tries to incorporate them in their solution in some form. And all this limelight on AI and ML has pushed the classic analytics professionals like statisticians (who stood their ground and decided to stay with that title rather than getting "rebranded" as data scientists) and good old Operations Research (OR) professionals into a separate categories. Whether talking to executives, reading books, or doing secondary research, a consistent theme is that we have classified the community of advanced analytics professionals in the supply chain world into two primary categories: OR and ML professionals. But do they need to always be in two distinct buckets in the supply chain? This article discusses how OR and ML algorithms can be leveraged in tandem to address critical challenges in the supply chain world.