Predictive Analytics
Predictive Analytics, The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, by Eric Siegel, Wiley 2014
It’s not just about the clicks, but more about gathering new data designed specifically to predict behavior, and wow, what surprises lie within Predictive Analytics. You will be shocked by the tables contained in Chapter 5. That Siegel, a former Columbia University professor, explains the new information-gathering and analytics methods in a way that actually lives right now in our lives, is amazing.
For example, did you know that clinical researchers can predict divorce with 90% accuracy, or that according to Siegel, LinkedIn considers its predictive suggestions of people you may know “the most important data product we built?” Or that Stanford University derived with predictive modeling an innovative method that diagnoses breast cancer better than human doctors in part by considering a greater number of factors in a tissue sample?
Some of these capabilities, you might say, were not doable prior to the Big Data era – we are just in the starting zone of collecting and sorting enough data in enough different areas to make this new science more powerful than we expected. And in fact where we may have already collected boatloads of personal data, it’s exciting or frightening to realize that analysts have only touched or manipulated a small portion of the stash. There is so much more to be done with retail, but healthcare will be more exciting, as well as politics.
And here’s best part – aside from learning new modeling and predictive techniques like uplift modeling –Siegel’s Afterword entitled “Ten Predictions for the First Hour of 2020: -
1. Antitheft – As you enter your car, a predictive model establishes your identity based on several biometric readings, rendering it virtually impossible for an imposter to start the engine.
Or
8. Driver Inattention. Your seat vibrates as internal sensors predict your attention has wavered – perhaps you were distracted by a personalized billboard a bit too long.
And
9. Collision avoidance. A stronger vibration plus a warning sound alerts you to a potential imminent collision – possibly with a child running toward the curb or another car threatening to run a red light.
You’ll learn new modeling methods, as well as discover who and what are accessing your click history to construct aggressive marketing campaigns And speaking of marketing, Professor Siegel has written an epitaph for traditional marketing simple analyses which often, as he observes, answer the wrong questions, and disregard the critical few non-responders.
Mill Girl Verdict: Fabulous fun, makes you want to learn more.