What Motivates Analytic Professionals?

There are many reasons why we love or hate our jobs. Professional analysts: what motivates YOU the most? If you could design the perfect job in analytics, what is the key?  For example, are you motivated by the nature of the work, the types of problems you solve, the financial incentives, career path upside, or something else? (... [read more]

Using predictive analytics for fantasy football

You'd think that a master of predictive analytics would steer clear of emotional entanglements with the lowly Detroit Lions. But hometown sympathies resist the power of reason and statistics. As a Philadelphian, this is something I know. In any case, an IBM analyst named Hetal Thaker reports great success using predictive analytics for... [read more]

Analytics skills in demand – and analytics pros demanding top salaries

Looking to hire top-notch data modelers, predictive analysts and other advanced data analytics professionals to beef up your organization’s analytics skills? Better get your checkbook ready. As more and more companies deploy predictive analytics tools and other data analytics software and begin filling the ranks of their analytics team... [read more]

To Test or to Target? Where to start for best ROI?

The previous post had concrete recommendations for proving the ROI of behavioral targeting. Several smart comments were left by readers that brought together a pretty clear picture. However, when I was meeting with a number of experienced online bankers in Istanbul recently the question that I received was more difficult to answer than... [read more]

Predictive Analytics and Sales Forecasting: The Latest Power Couple

“To maintain a competitive position in the market, companies are turning to sales analytics solutions that provide an enterprise-wide data flow into the forecasting process,” concludes a new research report from the Aberdeen Group.  The report finds that well-executed sales analytics can assist the business by “creating more refined... [read more]

Predictive Models are Only as Good as Their Acceptance by Decision-Makers

I have been reminded in the past couple weeks working with customers that in many applications of data mining and predictive analytics, unless the stakeholders of predictive models understand what the models are doing, they are utterly useless. When rules from a decision tree, no matter how statistically significant, don't resonate with... [read more]

It's time to industrialize analytics

There's a lot of talk about advanced analytics these days - the use of data mining and predictive analytics is growing rapidly so lots of articles, books (like Tom Davenport's latest) and blog posts are being written. One of these was by Jeff Kelly over on TechTarget on Data analytics team’s needs and, while I agree with some of what was... [read more]

Tiponomics: Analytics for Waiters

A recent lunchtime conversation with a friend reminded me that data-mining/analytics/optimization opportunities are lurking everywhere. It all started innocently enough. I miscalculated the tip at lunch and was about to leave a 10% tip (rather than the 20% that I was planning to) when my friend pointed out the error. He said that he had... [read more]

Listen to the "Trendspotting for Growth" webcast

Originally aired July 15th, 2010 As companies using analytics know, data is key to developing their best customers by supporting relevant and compelling product and service offers. Data analytics can provide insight into meaningful customer patterns that support retention, product usage patterns, and other key trends. SmartData... [read more]

Visualizing the census

Now that the 2010 survey is over, you might be wondering what we can learn from the data when the aggregated results are published. For a good guide to the kinds of questions you'll be able to answer, take a look at StatJump, where you can see tables and charts of the results of the 2000 census: population data (e.g. the largest ... [read more]

Data mining competition: HIV progression

Kaggle, a data-prediction company, is inviting numerati the world over to mine a small set of data and predict patterns in HIV. Offering $500, the competition has already drawn in 71 individuals and teams, and some of them have submitted dozens of predictions. As we saw in the famous Netflix datamining contest, these competitions can... [read more]

Three Sites to Check Out for Business Analytics Info

Business analytics is a broad subject area–so for most of us, it’s something of a challenge to stay on top of trending topics, locate useful resources, and keep an eye on the big picture.  But you might get a helping hand from one or more of these websites.  TechTarget’s SearchBusinessAnalytics.com is a well-organized gateway... [read more]