Here are a few interesting KPI's:

• Average session duration
• Proportion of active versus passive behavior (active = posting a blog, inviting a thread; passive = browsing, reading articles)
• New members per week, with breakdown US vs. non US
• Average number of groups per member
• Average number of friends per member
• Number of page views per user (per member) per month
• Time to last visit (average; per user; per…

HOPKINTON, Mass., Dec. 5, 2011 -- EMC Corporation today unveiled the findings of the largest-ever global survey of the data science community. Spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India and China, the EMC Data Science Study reveals and quantifies a rampant scarcity across the globe for the prerequisite skills necessary for a company to capitalize on the opportunities found at the intersection of Big Data and data analytics. Only one-third of companies are…

The Washington Education Association (WEA, in Washington State) is partnering with Aon Hewitts (Illinois), a verification company, to eliminate a specific type of health insurance fraud: teachers reporting non-qualifying people as dependents, such as an unemployed friend with no health insurance. The fraud is used by "nice" people (teachers) to provide health insurance to people who would otherwise have none, by reporting them as spouse or kids.

Interestingly, I saw the letter sent to…

For those that haven't heard of Kaggle before, Kaggle is a team of people that provide the functionality and support to host Data Mining contests. Here is how it works : Suppose that you are working for a Telco and wish to implement a new Churn prediction model. Rather than running this project in-house, you submit your data to Kaggle. What happens next is that -hopefully- many…

When you see google ads on Google search result pages or elsewhere, the ads that are displayed in front of you eyes (should) have been highly selected in order to maximize the chance that you convert and generate ad revenue for Google. Same on Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, LinkedIn and on all ad networks.

If you think that you see irrelevant ads, either they are priced very cheaply, or Google's ad relevancy algorithm is not working well.

Ad scoring algorithms used to be very simple,…

One of the most valuable tools that I've used, when performing exploratory analysis, is building a data dictionary. It offers the following advantages:

• Identify areas of sparsity and areas of concentration in high-dimensional data sets
• Identify outliers and data glitches
• Get a good sense of what the data contains, and where to spend time (or not) in further data mining

What is a data dictionary

A data dictionary is a table…

EMC Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance puts SQL and Hadoop in the same box, but is it a truly cohesive platform?

Social Media Tips for Analytics Professionals 

From Text and Data Mining to Market Research and Social Media Consulting, few are more influential than today’s guests. In advance of the West Coast Text Analytics Summit (Nov. 10-11, San Jose), Text Analytics News caught up with four analytics leaders who are helping…

Check the three charts below: only one shows no pattern and is truly random. Which one?

Chart #1

Chart #2

 …

Read my full interview for AMSTATat http://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2011/09/01/webanalytics/. You will also find my list of recommended books. Here is a copy of the interview, in case the original article (posted on AMSTAT News) disappear.

(Dr. Granville's Interview for AMSTAT)

Vincent Granville is chief scientist at a publicly traded company and the founder of AnalyticBridge. He has consulted on…

In this post I show how the accuracy of the classifier is influenced by the bag of words. 

The test has been done on a naive classifier but it returns good information about the data set.

http://textanddatamining.blogspot.com/

The above image is an example of the bag of words used in…

See below an example of an Analyticbridge email campaign that was monitored over a period of about 600 days. It clearly shows that 20% of all clicks originate after day #5. Yet most advertisers and publishers ignore clicks occurring after day #3. Not only 20% of all clicks occurred after day #3, but the best clicks (in terms of conversions) occurred several weeks after the email blast. Also, note an organic spike occurring on day #23 in the chart below -…

What is a data scientist? A data scientist is someone who analyzes an organization's big data to discover actionable trends that lead to business results. Data scientists look at what questions business people need to ask to remain competitive. They work directly with C-level executives, advising them on how to drive maximum value from big data and integrate new information. In many ways, a …

PLEASANTON, Calif.- February 25th, 2011 - The largest benchmark research ever done on business analytics establishes for the first time that analytics has become the new engine for business competitiveness and profitability. This landmark research from Ventana Research, which involved input from more than 2,850 organizations, makes clear for the first time the little-understood role of business analytics in the success and failure of businesses.



The research found that more than…

Below (in italic) is Revolution Analytics point of view. Mine is that is not just science, but a mix of craftsmanship, intuition, art, business acumen, magic and science. I would rather call it data witchcraft, and I call myself a data wizard.

Ever since the term "Data Scientist" was coined by DJ Patil and Jeff Hammerbacker in 2009,…

How big your data is depends on the quantity of information that it contains (measured using entropy metrics), rather than the number of terabytes. Huge data that is sparse or shallow is indeed not huge - and can be compressed very efficiently. What do you think?

Here's Stfan Carandy's viewpoint (founder of Bayesia Networks):

If I may cross-post the following from our blog at …

Source: Joshua Kitlas.

I have been working on this (mostly) annotated collection of tools and articles that I believe would be of help to both the data dabbler and professional. If you are a data scientist, data analyst or data dummy, chances are there is something in here for you. Included is a list of tools, such as programming languages and web-based utilities,…