Our network

Predictive Analytics

Is Big Data Causing a Big Brother System in Healthcare?

May 15, 2012 by Brett Stupakevich
with 306 views
0

3drenderings/shutterstock.com

The super hero who will solve this escalating problem? Predictive analytics. This mission is so critical to some healthcare providers such as Heritage Provider Network, a California-based physician group, that there’s a $3 million prize being offered for the algorithm that best predicts which patients will go to the hospital in the next year. [read more]

How Business Analytics Can Lead to That ‘Aha’ Moment

May 14, 2012 by Brett Stupakevich
with 157 views
0

3445128471/shutterstock.com

Core insights take data and make forward looking predictions, like how customers will act in the future or where, when and how a market will shift. Gartner Inc. describes analytics as the “combustion engine of business” and notes that the companies that use predictive analytics to analyze voluminous structured and unstructured data will grow 20% more than their competitors. [read more]

From Big Data to Smart Data: Supporting Critical Business Decisions

May 10, 2012 by Michael Fauscette
with 124 views
0

Last week at Lithium's LiNC event I did a session on big data with Lithium Principal Scientist Dr Michael Wu. It's always a pleasure working with Michael, the session was well attended and the audience was very engaged. Since then I have been thinking about what we presented and I think there were a few key points that are very important... [read more]

exclusive

Fight Back Against Black Swan Fatigue

May 9, 2012 by Paul Barsch
with 150 views
0

Wallenrock/shutterstock.com

No one is ever judged a hero for saving the company from what never (or is never supposed to) happen. Business executives must fight back against Black Swan fatigue, because in today’s interconnected and highly correlated world, the next extreme event could be the one that shoves your company off a cliff. [read more]

Can the Future of Mobile Be Found in Social? CI & CNBC Use Social Media Analytics to Find Out

May 9, 2012 by Jennifer Roberts
with 107 views
0

Obviously, there are big changes happening in the mobile space: the recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook, Google’s purchase of Motorola and T-Mobile’s rebranding ads highlight the dynamic nature of this space. The social aspects will continue to influence both phone adoption and technology enhancements as phone are used for purposes that rely more heavily on a social component, like gaming, sharing photos and music. [read more]

The New Way to Segment For a 6x Greater Return

May 5, 2012 by Esteban Kolsky
with 104 views
1

Kevin H Knuth/shutterstock.com

[Until now], we loaded the shotgun with pellets, shot in a general direction (segment) and some hit and some missed, if we did a decent job of segmenting we shot into a bush with tons of birds and we hit more than we miss. This is not the bestest model in the world, but it works. Sells product, mostly targeted at the right people. [read more]

The Netflix Prize, Occam's Razor and PMML

May 4, 2012 by Michael Zeller
with 254 views
0

cosma/shutterstock.com

But, can we somehow create a data mining contest in which Occam's razor is taken into account? Is that possible? I believe the answer is "yes" and it involves the use of open standards. For example, if the proposed solutions were to be delivered in PMML (the Predictive Model Markup Language) format, they could be put to work immediately. [read more]

Fashion + Analytics + Social = The Perfect Ensemble

April 27, 2012 by Timo Elliott
with 244 views
0

Better analytics can directly help profitability. Better analytics can help optimize every aspect of the fashion business, including the supply chain, customer segmentation, spotting hot items, avoiding stockouts, monitoring profitability, etc. Companies like Burberry have reduced costs by over $150 million by driving down stock inventory levels thanks to data coming from their SAP systems. [read more]

Another Wisdom of Crowds Prediction Win at eMetrics / Predictive Analytics World

April 27, 2012 by Dean Abbott
with 89 views
0

Two Unilytics employees at the booth, Gary Panchoo and Keith MacDonald, were kind enough to indulge me and my request to compute the average of all the guesses. John Elder was also there, licking his wounds from finished a close second as his guess, $374 was off by $12, a mere $2 away from the winning entry! The results of the analysis are here (summary statistics created by JMP Pro 10 for the mac). [read more]

The Data Analytics of the NFL Draft

April 26, 2012 by Brett Stupakevich
with 121 views
0

 iKandy/shutterfly.com

Today is a big day for all you football fans and data geeks. Are you ready for the NFL draft? This year’s draft features more analytics than ever before. Plus, the business decisions of NFL owners are center stage in light of what happened in Denver and Indianapolis the past couple months. [read more]

Gartner says predictive analytics are the hot BI topic.

April 23, 2012 by Doug Lautzenheiser
with 349 views
0

STILLFX/shutterstock.com

Rita Sallam, BI analyst for Gartner, says that the use of predictive analytics software will be pervasive by 2020. By pervasive, she means that three-quarters of all users will have access to predictive functionality. Today, that figure is less than one-third, while Sallam expects it to grow to half of the users in the next two years.“... [read more]

Revealing Human Nature through Social Media Measurement

April 20, 2012 by Lawrence Ampofo
with 124 views
0

3DDock/shutterstock.com

This recently published article in Nature examined how memes and ideas behave on social media platforms, shedding light on the nature of human behaviour online. In it, the research team claimed that (on Twitter at least) the average online user engages with only a limited number of memes as certain ideas survive, indeed thrive, at the expense of others. [read more]

Are You Asking the Right Questions with Predictive Analytics?

April 19, 2012 by Brett Stupakevich
with 291 views
0

When data scientists ask the right questions using predictive analytics, they’re not only able to address known business challenges but they can also uncover some of the unknowns. [read more]

Listening In: Big Ideas About Big Data

April 11, 2012 by Brett Stupakevich
with 476 views
0

Yuttasak Jannarong/shutterstock.com

National Public Radio is not the most obvious place for a deep dive on “The New World of Massive Data Mining,” so it may have surprised listeners when the April 2 edition of Diane Rehm’s popular NPR discussion program devoted an hour to just that topic. But the wide-ranging conversation covered some fascinating territory, and attracted thoughtful questions from the audience. [read more]

Musings on Watson: Why Healthcare?

April 10, 2012 by Neil Raden
with 160 views
0

kentoh/shutterstock.com

Watson is a marvelous invention by IBM, but its application to healthcare seems a little misguided. By engaging with one of the premier for-profit health insurance companies, one wonders if the desired outcome is better healthcare or just tighter control over claims costs. [read more]

Target variables matter but so do decisions.

April 10, 2012 by James Taylor
with 109 views
0

zentilia/shutterstock.com

Dean Abbot wrote a great post recently “Why Defining the Target Variable in Predictive Analytics is Critical” in which he referenced the CRISP-DM approach to building predictive analytic models and talked about the importance of target variable selection in building an effective model. [read more]