1. Short Bio

I started my career in the communications industry, where I spent 20 years with a Tier 1 carrier in probably 15 different jobs across the entire organization: Marketing, Advertising, Product Management, Operations, Sales, General Management, Strategy and Business Development. I basically experienced a multi-billion business from many different functional areas, at increasingly responsible…

About this Job

We're looking for highly motivated individuals to help us extract meaning from Twitter's massive dataset. As a Data Scientist for the Analytics team, you'll use statistical analysis and data mining techniques to help us better understand how users engage with Twitter, determine whether new and experimental features should be launched, and measure Twitter's success across the entire organization. You should be passionate about finding insights in data and using…

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…

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…

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 …