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…
Category: Big Data
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…
Using Marketing Analytics
Two of my MBA professors, Paul Farris and Ron Wilcox, along with a newer Darden professor Raj Venkatesan, have a new book. This examines using marketing analytics through cases. (Raj also runs the marketing analytics initiative at Darden). Numbers-Based Marketing The cases describe scenarios relevant to numbers-based marketing. For example, they allow readers to see the…
Thinking By The Numbers; Mostly Smart And Occasionally New
I enjoyed the book Super Crunchers. It is a couple of years old [in 2014] but it still reads well. Perhaps some of the surprise people might have had when it was published may have dissipated. In recent years things only the rare few knew about, e.g. metadata and data warehouses, have become staples of dinnertime conversation. It…
Marketing State Of Mind
Marketers often brag about understanding external customers. They often do this while ignoring internal customers. To be a great marketer understanding the end consumer isn’t enough. Having a “marketing state of mind” means trying to solve the problems of your internal customers. Why is that? Internal Customers Of Marketers Imagine a simplified firm: the accountants…
Understanding Numbers
Understanding numbers is vital to so many parts of life. It is a shame many otherwise sensible people don’t seem to take numbers seriously. Numbers Allow You To Understand Magnitude When I managed the finances of a political party the BBC’s political editor explained on TV that donations totaling 6 million pounds would run my…
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…
Marketing And The Republican Autopsy
The Republican’s recently issued an interesting competitive analysis of how the party’s marketing operations stack up. [Published in 2013]. The Growth and Opportunity Project has been dubbed the “Republican Autopsy”. This basically accepted that the 2012 national elections were a disaster for the party. So what can we learn from marketing and the Republican autopsy? Criticism…
