Predictive Analytics Quotes

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen. —Earl Wilson”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“We know the what, but we don’t know the why.6 When applying PA, we usually don’t know about causation, and we often don’t necessarily care. For many PA projects, the objective is more to predict than it is to understand the world and figure out what makes it tick.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Predictive modeling generates the entire model from scratch. All the model’s math or weights or rules are created automatically by the computer.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“But all predictive models share the same objective: They consider the various factors of an individual in order to derive a single predictive score for that individual. This score is then used to drive an organizational decision, guiding which action to take. Before using a model, we’ve got to build it. Machine learning builds the predictive model:”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“As data piles up, we have ourselves a genuine gold rush. But data isn’t the gold. I repeat, data in its raw form is boring crud. The gold is what’s discovered therein.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“PA’s mission is to engineer solutions. As for the data employed and the insights gained, the tactic in play is: “Whatever works.” And yet even hard-nosed scientists fight the urge to overexplain.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“The dilemma is, as it is often said, correlation does not imply causation.5 The discovery of a predictive relationship between A and B does not mean one causes the other, not even indirectly. No way, nohow.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“The emotions aren’t always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action. —William James”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Security is often at odds with civil liberties. The act of balancing between the two gets even trickier with predictive technology at play. PA threatens to attain too much authority. Like an enchanted child with a Magic 8 Ball toy (originated in 1950), which is designed to pop up a random answer to a yes/no question, insightful human decision makers could place a great deal of confidence in the recommendations of a system they do not deeply understand. What may render judges better informed could also sway them toward less active observation and thought, tempting them to defer to the technology as a kind of crutch and grant it undue credence. It’s important for users of PA—the judges and parole board members—to keep well in mind that it bases predictions on a much more limited range of factors than are available to a person.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“A crime risk model dehumanizes the prior offender by paring him or her down to the extremely limited view captured by a small number of characteristics (variables input to a predictive model). But, if the integration of PA promises to lower the overall crime rate—as well as the expense of unnecessary incarceration—is this within the acceptable realm of compromises to civil liberties one endures when incarcerated in the first place?”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“As NASA put it in 1965 when defending the idea of sending humans into space, “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.” But, for some tasks, we don’t have to pretend anymore. Everything changed in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Predictive modeling was key. No matter how fast the computer, perfection at chess is impossible, since there are too many possible scenarios to explore. Various estimates agree there are more chess games than atoms in the universe, a result of the nature of exponential growth. So the computer can look ahead only a limited number of moves, after which it needs to stop enumerating scenarios and evaluate game states (boards with pieces in set positions), predicting whether each state will end up being more or less advantageous.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“The Internet of free platforms, free services, and free content is wholly subsidized by targeted advertising, the efficacy (and thus profitability) of which relies on collecting and mining user data. —Alexander Furnas, writer for The Atlantic”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Data matters. It’s the very essence of what we care about. Personal data is not equivalent to a real person—it’s much better. It takes no space, costs almost nothing to maintain, lasts forever, and is far easier to replicate and transport. Data is worth more than its weight in gold—certainly so, since data weighs nothing; it has no mass. Data about a person is not as valuable as the person, but since the data is so much cheaper to manage, it’s a far better investment. Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, points out that a user’s data can be purchased for about half a cent, but the average user’s value to the Internet advertising ecosystem is estimated at $1,200 per year. Data’s value—its power, its meaning—is the very thing that also makes it sensitive. The more data, the more power. The more powerful the data, the more sensitive. So the tension we’re feeling is unavoidable.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Backtesting against historical data, all indications whispered confident promises for what this thing could do once set in motion. As John puts it, “A slight pattern emerged from the overwhelming noise; we had stumbled across a persistent pricing inefficiency in a corner of the market, a small edge over the average investor, which appeared repeatable.” Inefficiencies are what traders live for. A perfectly efficient market can’t be played, but if you can identify the right imperfection, it’s payday.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Even the most elite of engineers commits the most mundane and costly of errors. In late 1998, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter on a daunting nine-month trip to Mars, a mission that fewer than half the world’s launched probes headed for that destination have completed successfully. This $327.6 million calamity crashed and burned indeed, due not to the flip of fate’s coin, but rather a simple snafu. The spacecraft came too close to Mars and disintegrated in its atmosphere. The source of the navigational bungle? One system expected to receive information in metric units (newton-seconds), but a computer programmer for another system had it speak in English imperial units (pound-seconds). Oops.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Proponents like to say that predictive analytics is actionable. Its output directly informs actions, commanding the organization about what to do next. But with this use of vocabulary, industry insiders have stolen the word actionable, which originally has meant worthy of legal action (i.e., “sue-able”), and morphed it. This verbal assault comes about because people are so tired of seeing sharp-looking reports that provide only a vague, unsure sense of direction. With this word’s new meaning established, “Your fly is unzipped” is actionable (it is clear what to do—you can and should take action to remedy), but “You’re going bald” is not (there’s no cure; nothing to be done). Better yet, “I predict you will buy these button-fly jeans and this snazzy hat” is actionable, to a salesperson.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Once you develop a model, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. Predictions don’t help unless you do something about them. They’re just thoughts, just ideas. They may be astute, brilliant gems that glimmer like the most polished of crystal balls, but hanging”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Predictive modeling generates the entire model from scratch. All the model’s math or weights or rules are created automatically by the computer. The machine learning process is designed to accomplish this task, to mechanically develop new capabilities from data. This automation is the means by which PA builds its predictive power.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Predictive model—A mechanism that predicts a behavior of an individual, such as click, buy, lie, or die. It takes characteristics of the individual as input, and provides a predictive score as output. The higher the score, the more likely it is that the individual will exhibit the predicted behavior.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“What is the great revolution of science in the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science we don’t want to know . . . just how cancer works; we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Learning from data is virtually universally useful. Master it and you’ll be welcomed nearly everywhere! —John Elder”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“The alternative [to thinking ahead] would be to think backwards . . . and that’s just remembering. —Sheldon, the theoretical physicist on The Big Bang Theory”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“PA is the process by which an organization learns from the experience it has collectively gained across its team members and computer systems. In fact, an organization that doesn’t leverage its data in this way is like a person with a photographic memory who never bothers to think.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“As Mike Loukides, a vice president at the innovation publisher O’Reilly, once put it, “Data science is like porn—you know it when you see it.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“People . . . operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. —Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Predictive analytics (PA)—Technology that learns from experience (data) to predict the future behavior of individuals in order to drive better decisions.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Predicting better than pure guesswork, even if not accurately, delivers real value. A hazy view of what’s to come outperforms complete darkness by a landslide. The Prediction Effect: A little prediction goes a long way.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

“Calmness—a lack of anxiety—empowers you with the freedom to do as you please.”
― Eric Siegel, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die