A very common approach to building and understanding customer segments is through the use of clustering techniques such as Principle Components Analysis (PCA). These clustering techniques will analyze your customer data and see if customers tend to cluster by certain features, or combinations of features. Through such an approach, a marketer can use clusters to define specific segments. For example, running a cluster analysis could end up showing two clusters: one with customers who have…

Text (word) analysis and tokenized text modeling always give a chill air around ears, specially when you are new to machine learning. Thanks to Python and its extended libraries for its warm support around text analytics and machine learning. Scikit-learn is a savior and excellent support in text processing when you also understand some of the concept like "Bag of word", "Clustering" and "vectorization". Vectorization is  must-to-know technique for all machine leaning learners, text miner…

If there is one thing that travel suppliers and intermediaries can agree on it is that data is now central to decision-making. It is also clear the industry is increasingly moving towards measurable ROI driven models which are created through an in depth analysis of this data. But what makes an organisation truly data-driven?

On Tuesday 8th October at 15:00 GMT (10:00 EST) a selection of top travel brands will share their insights and discuss:

• What is the meaning of “big…

Among many inspiring talks at the Social Good Summit in NYC today, several will focus on the crucial theme of Data and Social Good.  If you have a moment and are interested in the growth of data-driven social good, I recommend tuning into the livestream here at the following times:

• 12:27 PM EDT: “#Big Data in the Era of…

Do the maverick mavens need managers?

The McKinsey and company report “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity” (May 2011) is a well publicized and circulated one on the internet .

The report projected that the demand for deep analytical positions in a big data world in the United States could exceed the supply based on the trends seen ( in 2011) , by 140,000 to 190,000 positions. While this was…

Setting up a data infrastructure and reaping the benefits is a journey. However, if you use data efficiently to react to market conditions faster, then chances are you could understand your customers better, while also driving incremental revenue. 

Find out more and hear insights from Chinmai Sharma, Vice President Revenue Management and Distribution at Louvre Hotels Group and Arne Erichsen, Director of Market Management, Expedia…

Google is the god of search, and most businesses are doing all they can to propitiate the search engine giant. Most of us turn to Google when we want an answer to almost any question, and the great god supplies it. Millions of businesses around the world want their website to show up when potential customers or visitors search for a specific set of keywords. And so we invest lots of time and effort in SEO.

Many business that had spent…

Comparing crop acreage harvested per county, in US, 1948-1952 vs. 2008-2012. The article was posted in USA Today with the title Climate Change Changing Agriculture. It is an interesting visual presentation (in USA Today) as you can superimpose the two images for better comparisons. Here, you…

An executive from IBM recently highlighted the need for more rigorous preparation for Big Data analytics within and beyond the financial industry inan article in the Wall Street Journal. The article outlined the dire need for qualified data scientists, how qualified business and finance students are, and how even liberal arts majors can and should be trained to…

Featured Articles

• Data Discovery Platform - Teradata Labs (Webinar, Oct 9 at 10 am PST)…

Extracting meaningful insights from data to address business needs has benefited immensely from the availability of data visualization  tools that have  data more approachable. Today the proliferation of off-the-shelf tools, which are easy to learn and are web enabled, have democratized the way data is presented and consumed. Tools like Spotfire, Tableau, Qikview have helped breathe life into data. They provide a professional look and feel and give an inherent feel of fidelity of the data…

I have just returned from the first ever ICHI (= International Conference on Healthcare Informatics) at which I discovered a "new generation" of healthcare researchers and policymakers, mostly under the age of 35 ... BUT with an UNDERSTANDING and PASSION of what needed to take place to get out of being in about 33rd place in the world in the quality of health care delivery and replacing it with ACCURACY / PATIENT CENTERED EFFECTIVENESS / and EFFICIENT COST EFFECTIVE processes that match what…

Bootstraps, Permutation Tests, and Sampling Orders of Magnitude Faster Using SAS, Computational Statistics-WIREs, Vol. 5, Issue 5, 391-405.  Download @ http://www.datamineit.com/DMI_publications.htm

While permutation tests and bootstraps have very wide-ranging application, both share a common potential drawback: as data-intensive resampling methods, both can be runtime prohibitive when applied to large or even…

For full post:  http://sctr7.com/2013/09/08/analytics-and-belief-the-struggle-for-truth/

Increasingly sophisticated analytics tools and methods are available to derive business insight from data.  However, as a discipline which drives insight from data, the crucial ‘last step’ in the analytics process is about organizational decision making.  A sophisticated, intensive analysis may all be…

Google Analytics is an important tool for companies to take action on their web analytics data but some organisations are still struggling to know how to use it to optimise revenue.

In this presentation Barbara Pezzi, Analytics of Revenue & Search Optimisation at Fairmont Raffles Hotels, shares her expert insights on how you can:

• Measure the success of your campaigns using ROI aligned with your revenue goals, not intangible clicks, likes or shares
• Segment…

Statistics.com, a provider of online education in statistics and analytics, announces a partnership with CrowdANALYTIX, a predictive modeling “managed crowdsourcing” company, offering a new online course, “Applied Predictive Analytics in partnership with CrowdANALYTIX“, which will run from Oct. 11 to Nov 8, 2013.

The goal of this course is to teach users (who have basic knowledge of R programming, predictive analytics…

Ronald Coase died last week. Coase was an economist and a Nobel laureate, not someone you would typically associate with modern data analytics. Still, Coase is noted in the field for coining the phrase, “If you torture data long enough it will confess.”

Coase’s quote, and his career, are reminders that analysis can have repercussions that go beyond the screen and the analysis, and have impacts on the work that we do…

Barnes & Noble is one of the 500 largest companies in the world. It operates 1350 bookstores (730 stores in cities and 630 in campuses) and the largest online bookstore, with roughly 10 million customers, sells 300 million books per year, and offers a 6 million references catalog.

The company goals are doing better than the competition (especially better than Amazon), and dominate the eBook market. For this the company aims to thoroughly analyze and control its…

The Comprehensive Analysis of Time Series (CATS) is an increasingly important use case in the field of Big Data analytics.  Cat videos on the Internet notwithstanding, the prevalence of time series is perhaps even more universally ubiquitous in big data applications: customer purchase histories, web click logs, social events, human behaviors, speech patterns, weather reports, climate science, numerical simulation science, spread of infectious diseases, market…