
Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight

And quantifying the forecast uncertainty by creating prediction intervals is invaluable and often ignored in the forecasting world.
John W. Foreman • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
At a simplistic level, you feed a supervised AI algorithm some historical data, purchases at Target for example, and you tell the algorithm, “Hey, these purchases were from pregnant people, and these other purchases were from not-so-pregnant people.”
John W. Foreman • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
Your goals should be things like using data to facilitate better targeting, forecasting, pricing, decision-making, reporting, compliance, and so on. In other
John W. Foreman • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
Data science is the transformation of data using mathematics and statistics into valuable insights, decisions, and products.
John W. Foreman • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
You need to standardize each column so that the values are closer to the same center and spread.
John W. Foreman • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
At MailChimp, we retrain our models offline once a quarter, test them, and then promote them into production.
John W. Foreman • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
business receives feedback on how their audience is engaging at the individual level through click tracking, online purchases, social sharing, and so on.
John W. Foreman • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
You can use it to classify company e-mails, customer support transcripts, AP wire articles, the police blotter, medical documents, movie reviews, whatever!
John W. Foreman • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
best model is one that strikes the right balance between functionality and maintainability. If an analytics model is never used, it's worthless.