BzST

Trading and predictive analytics

2011-12-20T07:16:00.000-08:00

I attended today's class in the course Trading Strategies and Systems offered by Prof Vasant Dhar from NYU Stern School of Business. Luckily, Vasant is offering the elective course here at the Indian...

Polleverywhere.com -- how it worked out

2011-12-07T02:48:00.001-08:00

Following up on my earlier post about the use of polleverywhere.com for polling in class, here is a summary of my experience using it in a data mining elective course @ ISB (38 students, after four...

Early detection of what?

2011-10-16T23:49:00.000-07:00

The interest in using pre-diagnostic data for the early detection of disease outbreaks, has evolved in interesting ways in the last 10 years. In the early 2000s, I was involved in an effort to...

Language and psychological state: explain or predict?

2011-10-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

Quite a few of my social science colleagues think that predictive modeling is not a kosher tool for theory building. In our 2011 MISQ paper "Predictive Analytics in Information Systems Research" we...

Statistical considerations and psychological effects in clinical trials

2011-09-18T23:21:00.000-07:00

I find it illuminating to read statistics "bibles" in various fields, which not only open my eyes to different domains, but also present the statistical approach and methods somewhat differently and...

Mining health-related data: How to benefit scientific research

2011-09-14T23:51:00.000-07:00

Image from KDnuggets.com While debates over privacy issues related to electronic health records are still ongoing, predictive analytics are beginning to being used with administrative health data...

Multiple testing with large samples

2011-09-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

Multiple testing (or multiple comparisons) arises when multiple hypotheses are tested using the same dataset via statistical inference. If each test has false alert level α, then the combined false...

"Predict" or "Forecast"?

2011-09-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

What is the difference between "prediction" and "forecasting"? I heard this being asked quite a few times lately. The Predictive Analytics World conference website has a Predictive Analytics Guide...

Active learning: going mobile in India

2011-08-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

I've been using "clickers" since 2002 in all my courses. Clickers are polling devices that students use during class to answer multiple-choice questions that I include in my slides. They encourage...

Where computer science and business meet

2011-08-17T00:14:00.000-07:00

Data mining is taught very differently at engineering schools and at business schools. At engineering schools, data mining is taught more technically, deciphering how different algorithms work. In...

The potential of being good

2011-08-04T06:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I happened to hear talks by two excellent speakers, both on major data mining applications in industry. One common theme was that both speakers gave compelling and easy to grasp examples of...

Analytics: You want to be in Asia

2011-07-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

Business Intelligence and Data Mining have become hot buzzwords in the West. Using Google Insights for Search to "see what the world is searching for" (see image below), we can see that the...

Designing an experiment on a spatial network: To Explain or To Predict?

2011-07-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

Image from http://www.slews.de Spatial data are inherently important in environmental applications. An example is collecting data from air or water quality sensors. Such data collection mechanisms...

Got Data?!

2011-06-20T02:23:00.000-07:00

The American Statistical Association's store used to sell cool T-shirts with the old-time beggar-statistician question "Got Data?" Today it is much easier to find data, thanks to the Internet. Dozens...

Scatter plots for large samples

2011-06-16T22:08:00.000-07:00

While huge datasets have become ubiquitos in fields such as genomics, large datasets are now also becoming to infiltrate research in the social sciences. Data from eCommerce sites, online dating...

Nice April Fool's Day prank

2011-05-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

The recent issue of the Journal of Computational Graphics & Statistics published a short article by Columbia Univ Prof Andrew Gelman (I believe he is the most active statistician-blogger) called...

Google Spreadsheets for teaching probability?

2011-04-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

In business schools it is common to teach statistics courses using Microsoft Excel, due to its wide accessibility and the familiarity of business students with the software. There is a large debate...

Moving Average chart in Excel: what is plotted?

2011-04-16T04:26:00.000-07:00

In my recent book Practical Time Series Forecasting: A Practical Guide, I included an example of using Microsoft Excel's moving average plot to suppress monthly seasonality. This is done by creating...

Visualizing time series: suppressing one pattern to enhance another pattern

2011-04-09T04:00:00.000-07:00

Visualizing a time series is an essential step in exploring its behavior. Statisticians think of a time series as a combination of four components: trend, seasonality, level and noise. All real-world...

No correlation -> no causation?

2010-12-23T09:16:00.000-08:00

I found an interesting variation on the "correlation does not imply causation" mantra in the book Applied Multiple Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences by Cohen et al....

Discovering moderated relationship in the era of large samples

2010-12-12T19:25:00.000-08:00

I am currently visiting the Indian School of Business (ISB) and enjoying their excellent library. As in my student days, I roam the bookshelves and discover books on topics that I know little, some,...

November Analytics magazine on BI

2010-11-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

click to read the latest issue A bunch of interesting articles about business analytics and predictive analytics from a managerial point of view, in the November issue of INFORMS Analytics magazine.

Data visualization in the media: Interesting video

2010-11-14T04:50:00.000-08:00

A colleague who knows my fascination with data visualization pointed me to a recent interesting video created by Geoff McGhee on Journalism in the Age of Data. In this 8-part video, he interviews...

ASA's magazine: Excel's default charts

2010-11-10T01:06:00.000-08:00

Being in Bhutan this year, I have requested the American Statistical Association (ASA) and INFORMS to mail the magazines that come with my membership to Bhutan. Although I can access the magazines...

Neat data mining competition; strange rule?

2010-09-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

I received notice of an upcoming data mining competition by the Direct Marketing Association. The goal is to predict sales volume of magazines at 10,000 newsstands, using real data provided by CMP...