The IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service) has been using computers to choose tax returns for audit since 1962. Early on, the selection was rule-based, but the IRS turned to statistical modeling in 1969, using the oldest predictive analytics model in the toolbox - discriminant analysis.…
The U.S. baseball season opens Thursday, March 28, and celebrates the 48th season of analytics in baseball, beginning with the founding of the Sabermetric Society in 1971 (the same year that Satchel Paige entered the Hall of Fame). Analytics has come a long way in…
In most statistical modeling or machine learning prediction tasks, there will be cases that can be easily predicted based on their predictor values (signal), as well as cases where predictions are unclear (noise). Two statistical learning methods, boosting and ProfWeight, use those difficult cases in…
The Art of Persuasion is the title of more than one book in the self-help genre, books that have spawned blogs, podcasts, speaking gigs and more. But the science of persuasion is actually of more interest, because it produces useful rules that can be studied…
Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in behavioral economics, much of it with his colleague Amos Tversky, who died in 2006. Kahneman's 2011 classic, Thinking Fast and Slow, is a superbly-written non-technical summary of their fascinating research and its often…
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…
In a couple of days, theWall Street Journalwill come out with its November survey of economists' forecasts. It's a particularly sensitive time, with elections in a few days and President Trump attacking the Federal Reserve for for raising interest rates. It's a good time to…
Two important statistical modeling courses are coming up in May. May 18 - Jun 15: Principal Components and Factor Analysis May 18 - Jun 15: Modeling Count Data Factor analysis is used frequently in social science research where you want to examine that which…
