SCTR7: Data Science and Analytics

In the mid-1980’s I worked as an information analyst / data manager in a police station in a small town in New England (northeast U.S.).  It was a strange but exciting experience for a young man, chosen simply as I was identified as the local ‘computer geek’ at the town high school (a small and […]

The adage ‘garbage-in-garbage-out’ is an analytics mantra so ingrained it has its own shorthand: GIGO. Yet, in the mad, blind rush toward all things ‘big data’, there is the danger of sidelining the crucial-but-dreary topic of data quality, to which GIGO refers. While data quality is not as ‘sexy’ as big data, anyone who wants […]

Network analysis is a rapidly growing analytics domain propelled by the explosion of interest in social networking. The methods rest upon much older foundations in the realms of statistics and social science. Euler’s graph theory was proposed in the early 18th century and Moreno established the foundations for social network analysis (SNA) in the 1930’s. Want […]

Increasingly sophisticated analytics tools and methods are available to derive business insight from data.  However, as a discipline which drives insight from data, the crucial ‘last step’ in the analytics process is about organizational decision making.  A sophisticated, intensive analysis may all be for naught if the crucial last step, framing and committing to a decision, misses the […]

Recently I was chastised for being ‘unnecessarily obscure’ for reacting to a specious conclusion by suggesting that it risked ‘conflating correlation with causation’. Guilty as charged!  I apologize:  the expression is quite a mouthful and requires unraveling for those unfamiliar with the nuances of the applied experimental method.  However, I feel passionately that this concept […]

Business analytics model risk (part 0 of 5): framing model risk – the complexity genie and the challenge of deciding on decision models Introduction to a series of five articles on model risk Here we introduce a series of five articles seeking to frame, define, and categorize business analytics model risk.  The intention is to […]

From all the recent airplay on the topic of ‘analytics’, trending under the guise of rapidly proliferating marketing buzz-terms such as ‘Big Data’ and emerging computational practices such as ‘Machine Learning’, one might easily get the notion that ‘business analytics’ is a recent innovation. My mission, and the intention of this humble blog is to […]