"Analytics"

Post date: Jan 12, 2013 11:59:59 AM

"Analytics" and "Big Data" are hot terms right now. Here's the Google ngram (a measure of the frequency of appearance of a word in the Google Books project) for analytics.

The little bump in popularity back between 1810 and 1820 was when 'analysis' became an important technical term in mathematics. As the 1810 Encyclopedia Brittanica put it: "ANALYTICS Analjtka the science and use analysis: The great advantage of the modem mathematics above the ancient is in point of analytics ... To the modern analytics principally belong algebra."

Today the references are all closer to home; books like "Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics" and "Competing on Analytics: the New Science of Winning".

Talking with people unused to the idea of analytics can be made easier if they happen to have seen the film Moneyball, which chronicles Billy Beane and Peter Brands efforts to use analytics (called 'sabermetrics' in the baseball world of the time) to build a winning team for the Oakland Athletics in 2002. The term sabermetrics comes from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), and is one of the places where analytics was really seriously pursued around a human activity for the first time. There's an interesting 1994 "Sabermetrics Manifesto" which concludes:

"Baseball statistics are useful only if they enhance your understanding of the game. Therefore, they should be judged by how well they measure what actually happens in the game. Meaningless statistics should be ignored or replaced; deficient statistics should be improved. And well-designed statistics should be used as an important part of discussion about the game and its players."

Makes the point about analytics and their use pretty well.

Cheers,

Tim