I teach a class on Data Mining at Stanford. Students in my class are expected to do a project that does some non-trivial data mining. Many students opted to try their hand at the Netflix Challenge: to design a movie…

One of my favorite blog posts ever. A very simple idea: it’s easier to win by creatively combining data than by using ever more sophisticated algorithms.

This is especially important today due to two major trends in the analytics world:

  1. More data sets than ever before are available to businesses that have the technology to leverage them, and

  2. It is becoming harder and harder to hire Statisticians and “Data Scientists”

My take: businesses that can harness data creatively will win - especially over those that instead try to employ blackbox incomprehensible and complex algorithms