When you do a book search on Amazon using keywords, in the search result page you see 16 results. If you've bought one (or more) of these books, it still shows up on the search result page. It would be easy to eliminate that book that you already purchased (e.g. by showing it at the bottom of the page), and replacing it by another book that you haven't purchased yet. Sounds to me like an obvious, simple optimization trick. Maybe Amazon's statisticians use very complex models that change…

A New Approach to Missing Values Processing with Bayesian Networks

Download the white paper here (39.5 MB).

With the abundance of “big data” in the field of analytics, and all the challenges today’s immense data volume is causing, it may not be particularly fashionable or pressing to discuss missing values. After all, who cares…

The solution is simple: leverage external data, and simplify your predictive model.

Back in 2000 I was working with GE's analytic team to improve sales forecasts for NBC Internet, a web portal owned by NBC. The sales / finance people were using a very basic formula to predict next month sales, based mostly on sales from previous month. With GE, we started to develop more…