MasterCard is debuting an online shopping site, MasterCard Marketplace, which breaks new ground as a card company tries to sell directly to end consumers. To date, they’ve only offered products directly as an option for redeeming reward points. According to the New York Times, MasterCard claims that it “can pinpoint with considerable accuracy what its [...]
We’re pleased to have a guest post this week from Kaiser Fung, a business statistician and author of the new book, Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do. He has written a series of posts on his blog recording his thoughts as he makes his way through [...]
Making better decisions — it is the ultimate goal of any analytics initiative and the passion of analytics’ executives. After all, there is no sense in crunching data just for the sake of crunching. No, we want to enable the decisions that boost revenue, cut costs, and deepen customer relationships. Eric Siegel, the conference chair [...]
There was a fascinating article in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a professor from New York University who believes he has a mathematical model that can predict whether or not Iran will develop a nuclear bomb: “For 29 years, Bueno de Mesquita has been developing and honing a [...]
The fabled Netflix Prize competition is closed although a winner won’t be announced until September. The company offered $1 million to anyone who could most improve their movie recommendation algorythm with a minimum threshhold of 10%. As of the July 26 closing, two teams had exceeded the 10% mark and were neck-and-neck (about 1/1000th of [...]
“From the ‘Mad Men’ era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tagline, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly,” gushed the New York Times [...]
Today everybody is talking about predictive analytics, and it’s undeniably desirable to be able to predict the behavior of customers, employees, voters, or other sources of uncertainty. However, while predictive analytics are always difficult, they are particularly difficult in the current economic crisis. If you’re trying to predict the future behaviors of customers based on [...]
