Machine learning is in the ascendancy. Particularly when it comes to pattern recognition, machine learning is the method of choice. Tangible examples of its applications include fraud detection, image recognition, predictive maintenance, and train delay prediction systems. In day-to-day machine learning (ML) and the quest to deploy the knowledge gained, we typically encounter these three main problems (but not the only ones).

Financial institutions have a natural desire to predict the volume, volatility, value or other parameters of financial instruments or their derivatives, to manage positions and mitigate risk more effectively. They also have a rich set of business problems (and correspondingly large datasets) to which it’s practical to apply machine learning techniques.

This month we released several new features in beta, including query scheduling, new BigQuery ML models and functions, and geospatial types and queries. We also released the ORC ingest format into GA. Let’s take a closer look at these features and what they might mean for you.