Who benefits by predicting your behavior? Organizations do—companies, governments, hospitals, and political campaigns. They employ predictive analytics, technology that learns from data to render per-person predictions, one individual at a time.

 

People have been struck by the final words in the title of my new book on this subject, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (…

Joel Schectman at the Wall Street Journal wrote about a story broken in my new book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die.

Wall Street Journal Article:

Book: HP Piloted Program to Predict Which Workers Would Quit

Joel Schectman, Wall Street Journal

Hewlett Packard Co. tested a predictive scoring system that attempted…

What's next is what's next… Predictive analytics is where business intelligence is going.

— Rick Whiting, InformationWeek



Ten Predictions for the First Hour of 2020



Good morning. It's January 2, 2020, the first workday of the year. As you drive to the office, the only thing predictive analytics doesn't do for you is steer the car (yet that's coming soon as well).



1. Anti-theft. As you enter your car, a predictive model establishes your…

The Fiscal Times is running an excerpt from my book, Predictive Analytics, about the Obama campaign's use of uplift modeling (aka net lift or persuasion modeling).

ARTICLE: The Real Story Behind Obama's Election Victory 

By Eric Siegel 

Elections hang by a thinner thread than you think.

By now you probably know that Barack Obama's 2012 campaign for a second term "moneyballed" the…

Read the Preface for Siegel’s Book – Predictive Analytics

Here is the preface for Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

By Eric Siegel, with a foreword from Tom Davenport

(Wiley, February 2013)

 

To order the book:…

Webinar signup: Advances in Gradient Boosting: the Power of Post-Processing

December 14, 10-11 a.m., PST

Webinar Registration: http://2.salford-systems.com/gradientboosting-and-post-processing/  

Course Outline:

I. Gradient Boosting and Post-Processing:

o What is missing from Gradient Boosting?

o Why post-processing techniques are used?

II.…

Improving our presentation skills will make for happier clients and bosses.  In this article, Tim Graettinger focuses on five crucial practices that will make your next presentation…

Is it possible to use data mining techniques to predict how many medals each nation will win at the Olympic Games?  What is it about a nation that allows it to produce Olympic medal-winning athletes?  Why do some countries take home a bundle of medals while others don't?  As we think more and more about it, it quickly becomes clear that the why’s behind the medal counts at the Olympics are complex.…

To signup go to - http://www.crowdanalytix.com/contests/data-mining-accelerating-drug-discovery-by-text-mining-of-patents/

The objective of this contest is to use advanced analytics, text mining and visualization methods combined with domain knowledge, ontologies and frameworks to support and accelerate the process of drug…

For all the strides that data mining tools have made, using them well still requires hard work and critical thought.  In this article on the nuts & bolts of DM, we review a real workhorse for data mining and analysis - the histogram.  Among the histograms encountered most frequently in practice are the following: “money”, “count”, and “outlier”.  We will look at each one of them in turn….     Read the…

Another recent article from Discovery Corps, Inc. president Tim Graettinger:   Grab Bag 2:  More Frequently-Asked Questions about Data Mining.  

"While helping present a monthly webinar on Data Mining, I'm asked some challenging and really pivotal questions about DM and predictive analytics:  

1. How much data do I need? 
2. Why doesn't my predictive model perform as well on new data as it did on the training data?
3. Are new DM algorithms needed to…

This is a quick entry to tell you about three things --



- My free report, "Text/Content Analytics 2011: User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers," is out. Are you looking for business value in "unstructured" social, online, or enterprise sources? My report will provide background information and "wisdom of the crowds" guidance you can use. Download the report free via altaplana.com/TA2011.



- For a deeper dive into…

The president of the data mining company I work for recently published a new article on data mining.  This article from Tim Graettinger addresses some of the top questions he's been asked during a webinar on data mining that he helps to present:

• What tools or tool sets does he recommend?
• How can I get management to 'buy in' on a data mining project?
• How can I transform non-numeric data so I can use it easily in predictive modeling?

If you have a data mining problem that you would like to share or organize a challenge for your friends or studets, you may do this for free on TunedIT website. You may use it as a more creative method of working on a project, to evaluate progress of your students or as a way of  proving who is right in a bet :)

To launch a competition, please follow the link: http://tunedit.org/data-competitions.