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