SCTR7: Data Science and Analytics

Among my greatly respected global colleagues and friends on LinkedIn, there seem to be persistent, circular debates concerning the nature and viability of the data science profession. Opinions seem to run the gamut from ‘data science is the best thing since sliced bread and will take over the world’ to ‘data science is a weak, […]

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 […]

As an analytics professional, it may perhaps be no surprise that I believe in a world which is susceptible to analysis – a world which yields to scientific inquiry. Further, I believe that if we invest effort, if we exert what Kahneman would call our System 2, we can improve decisions and overcome our tendency […]

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 […]

  This is a review committee working group for practitioners and academics to establish a formal definition and set of classification criteria regarding business analytics model risk. This group has been established based upon interest and feedback concerning a recent set of posts regarding business analytics model risk: http://tinyurl.com/ktabt3q For those interested, you can join the […]

Business analytics model risk (part 2 of 5):  saving the kingdom, one nail at a time… Following from article 1 of 5 on Business Analytics Model Risk Link to introductory header article (0 of 5) For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want […]

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 […]