Gangs and Covid

Dr. Carlos Carcach is Professor & Director of the Center for Public Policy at the Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios (ESEN) in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, and coordinator of ESEN's post-graduate program in predictive analytics, which offers online instruction in partnership with Statistics.com, using…

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Data Analytics

Terminology in Data Analytics As data continue to grow at a faster rate than either population or economic activity, so do organizations' efforts to deal with the data deluge, and use it to capture value.  And so do the methods used to analyze data, which…

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Matching Algorithms

Some applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence are recognizably impressive - predicting future hospital readmission of discharged patients, for example, or diagnosing retinopathy. Others - self-driving cars, for example - seem almost magical. The matching problem, though, is one where your first reaction might…

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Statistically Significant – But Not True

If you are looking for the Feature Engineering blog post, you can find it here: https://www.statistics.com/feature-engineering-data-prep-still-needed/ In 2015, at an Alzheimer's conference, Biogen researchers presented dramatic brain scans showing that the antibody aducanumab effectively cleared out plaque in the brain, plaque that was associated with…

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Industry Spotlight: Customer Segmentation

Are you "young and rustic?" Or perhaps a "toolbelt traditionalist?" These are nicknames given to customer segments identified by market research firm Claritas, with its statistical clustering tool. Long before the advent of individualized product recommendations, business sought to segment customers into distinct groups on…

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Why Analytics Projects Fail – 5 Reasons

With the news full of so many successes in the fields of analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, it is easy to lose sight of the high failure rate of analytics projects. McKinsey just came out with a report that only 8% of big companies…

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Job Spotlight: Digital Marketer

A digital marketer handles a variety of tasks in online marketing - managing online advertising and search engine optimization (SEO), implementing tracking systems (e.g. to identify how a person came to a retailer), web development, preparing creatives, implementing tests, and, of course, analytics. There are…

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Things are Getting Better

In the visualization below, which line do you think represents the UN's forecast for the number of children in the world in the year 2100? Hans Rosling, in his book Factfulness, presents this chart and notes that in a sample of Norwegian teachers, only 9%…

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Work and Heat

If you are working on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, odds are it is from home, where you can (usually) control the temperature in the home. Which, from the standpoint of productivity, is a good thing. According to a study from Cornell, raising…

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Course Spotlight: The Text Analytics Sequence

Text analytics or text mining is the natural extension of predictive analytics, and Statistics.com's text analytics program starts Feb. 6. Text analytics is now ubiquitous and yields insight in: Marketing: Voice of the customer, social media analysis, churn analysis, market research, survey analysis Business: Competitive…

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Dialects

When talking to several people, do you address them as "you guys"? "Y'all"? Just "you"? And is the carbonated soft drink "soda" or "pop?" Maps based on survey responses to questions like this were published in the Harvard Dialect Survey in 2003. Josh Katz took…

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Needle in a Haystack

What's the probability that the NSA examined the metadata for your phone number in 2013? According to John Inglis, Deputy Director at the NSA, it's about 0.00001, or 1 in 100,000. A surprisingly small number, given what we've all been reading in the media about…

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Terrorist Clusters

The "righteous vengeance gun attack" is just one of 10 types of terrorism identified by Chenoweth and Lowham via statistical clustering techniques. Another cluster is "bombings of a public population where a liberation group takes responsibility." You can read about the 10 clusters, and the…

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Statistics.com Partners With CrowdANALYTIX to Offer New Online Course With Crowdsource Contest As Project

Crowdsourcing, using the power of the crowd to solve problems, has been used for many functions and tasks, including predictive modeling (like the 2009 Netflix Contest). Typically, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of statistical modelers on the Internet, and solutions are sought. Every…

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