Last Friday (August 22nd), I achieved a milestone on Stack Overflow, a computing question-and-answer site, by hitting 200,000 points. So far this year, I have also earned more points than anyone, a testament to my obsession with the site (you can...
Last Friday (August 22nd), I achieved a milestone on Stack Overflow, a computing question-and-answer site, by hitting 200,000 points. So far this year, I have also earned more points than anyone, a testament to my obsession with the site (you can...
This is a continuation of my previous post on multi-armed bandits. And, I'm guessing there will be at least one more after this.The Multi-Armed Bandit problem is a seemingly simple problem. A gambler is faced with a row of slot machines, ea...
"A lot of good analysis is wasted doing the wrong thing."Anyone who has worked with data on business problems is probably aware of this adage. And this past week, I was reminded once again of this fact while analyzing a marketing program. T...
SQL is a very powerful language, which could, of course, be made even more powerful and useful. This post discusses three features of the language -- ANSI standard features -- that seem not only unnecessary but downright detrimental. That i...
I happen to think that SQL is a very viable option for analyzing big data. I was thinking about this when I a book review recently:For instance, Siegel reports, people who buy small felt pads that adhere to the bottom of chair legs (to protect th...
Last week, a book -- a real, hard-cover paper-paged book -- arrived in the mail with the title: Heuristics in Analytics: A Practical Perspective of What Influences Our Analytic World. The book wasn't a total surprise, because I had re...
Euclidean geometry, formalized in Euclid's Elements about 2,300 years ago, is in many ways a study of lines and circles. One might think that after more than two millennia, we have moved beyond such basic shapes particularly in a realm such as da...
Recently, I was approached by Vicky whom I'm working with at a client, to help with a particular problem. She wanted to calculate page view summaries for a random sample of visitors from a table containing about a billion page views. This i...
Gordon and I rarely find ourselves in the same city these days, but on November 15 we will be in Cary, North Carolina with our friends at JMP for a webcast with Anne Milley. The format will be kind of like the first presidential debate with Anne ...
One of our clients is a large media website that faced a simple question: What is the best way to find the most engaged users on the web site? The goal was to focus a marketing effort on these users.A media web site is challenging, because there is n...
