Predictive Analytics

“How much more likely is this treatment to generate the desired outcome than the alternative treatment?”

Your purchases relate to your shopping history, online behavior, and preferred payment method, and to the actions of your social contacts. Data reveals how to predict consumer behavior from these elements. Your health relates to your life choices and environment, and therefore data captures connections predictive of health based on type of neighbor

leverage competitive spirit to garner scientific advancement. Like a horse race, a competition levels the playing field and unambiguously singles out the best entrant.

correlation does not imply causation.5 The discovery of a predictive relationship between A and B does not mean one causes the other, not even indirectly. No way, nohow.

Things turn around for Bill when he recognizes that his plight in fact endows him with the ability to test different marketing treatments on the same subject under exactly the same situation—and then observe the outcome.

YouTube gains an hour of video each second. Estimates put the World Wide Web at over 8.32 billion web pages.

Six hundred blog posts are published per minute;

Twitter, “Every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10-million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace,” says the official Twitter blog.

Unlike the social sciences, PA’s objective is to improve operational efficiency rather than figure people out for its own sake—and, either way, just because you’re observing a person does not mean that person is being treated like an animal.