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…

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,…