Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics

We’ve set up a website (http://keeping upwiththequants.weebly.com) where readers can ask any question about analytical knowledge, techniques, or the problems they are facing in solving specific problems.

For example, at Cisco Systems, a forecasting project addressed the possibility that substantially more accurate forecasts were possible through statistical methods

The definition of a data scientist is someone who is an expert not only at analyzing data, but at getting it in shape to analyze.

human mathematicians have found many patterns in the application of pi—which is the new role for human creativity in analytical thinking. For example, in a story told by mathematician David Acheson:

They speculated that a high level of linguistic ability in early life may act as a buffer to cognitive decline by facilitating mnemonic processes for encoding, organizing, and retrieving information.

He knows, through a quite involved calculation, that at some point in a series of two hundred coin-flips, either heads or tails will come up six or more times in

whether any changes resulting from experiments are statistically significant.

Georg Hegel, the German philosopher, felt that only the person who thinks highly analytically can have pure and true intuition.11

Companies can now base important decisions on real, scientifically valid experiments. In the past, any foray into randomized testing (the random assignment to groups that we mentioned above) meant employing or engaging a PhD in statistics or a “design of experiments” expert.