Category: Modeling
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Conducting Business Tests
We should be conducting business tests to have more confidence we are doing the right thing. Small And Big Decisions In business decisions are often taken “without having any real evidence to back them up” (Davenport, 2009, page 69). This is a source of great frustration to me, (and many academics). To be fair sometimes there…
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Uncovering The Message In The Mess Of Big Data
This week I’m focusing on research that I’ve co-authored with Xin Wang in Business Horizons. We called this ‘Uncovering the Message in the Mess of Big Data’. Our article aims to explain to managers how they can work out what the messages are in large amounts of data. What Data Should You Look At? The classic application…
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Explaining Omitted Variable Bias
Charles Whelan’s Naked Statistics is an enjoyable and informative read. He does a very good job of simplifying statistics. He explains what statistical methods can do but also the problems that people get into using statistics. Here I’ll focus on him explaining Omitted Variable Bias. Whelan tackles this problem very clearly. Explaining Omitted Variable Bias Omitted variable bias sounds like…
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Understanding The Topics In Consumer Research
The Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) reached forty years old in 2015. To help the celebrations we conducted an analysis of the topics featured in the journal over the years. For many journals, you can use the keywords supplied by the authors. The downside of this is that authors may use fashionable words wanting to…
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Antifragility
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is clearly worth listening to. His idea of antifragility is useful. But he seems determined to alienate people. His book, Antifragile, is sprawling and confrontational. He uses it to settle a long list of scores with famous names. Those who disagree are not merely wrong. Instead, they are portrayed as cartoon villains…
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Story Spreadsheets
Business school spreadsheets annoy me. I’m not anti-spreadsheet generally. Indeed, a good spreadsheet is a thing of beauty. What irritates me is the belief students have that a good spreadsheet is a complicated spreadsheet. Students sometimes think that the more they can jam onto a single worksheet the better. This fundamentally mistakes the purpose of…
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The Problem Of Overfitting
Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise has much to recommend it. It is about prediction generally, rather than being focused specifically on baseball or politics where he built his reputation. He also notes challenges with statistical models, specifically the problem of overfitting. The Problem Of Overfitting A problem Silver addresses is the overfitting of mathematical…
