In the business analytics universe, the discipline of "business intelligence" is often frowned upon. Business intelligence is primarily generating reports on business metrics, tracking them over time, and producing ad-hoc analyses explaining these trends. People often complain that such work is not challenging and not sexy. There is a stigma that BI work is data dumping. In reality, good BI work is rare and extremely valuable. Horrible BI work is…
Last week, I gave some brief remarks at the INFORMS New York Metro Student-Practitioner Forum (link), attended by a large group of enthusiastic students eager to enter the field of data science and analytics. (By the way, if you are at the INFORMS Analytics Conference in Orlando, come and find me. I am speaking on Ethics on Tuesday morning.) I told the students that it is not too early to…
It's gratifying to live through the incredible rise of statistics as a discipline. In a recent report by the American Statistical Association (ASA), we learned that enrollment at all levels (bachelor, master and doctorate) has exploded in the last 5-10...
We all know that data science/business analytics is booming. Lots of companies are creating lots of jobs. However, the barriers to entry into this field are substantial. In an article for rSQUAREedge, I summarized my own experience as a hiring manager. A data analyst needs intuition about data, which requires practical experience. Certain skills, like web analytics and A/B testing, are not academic research areas, and are not unusually taught…
This map appeared in Princeton Alumni Weekly: Here is another map I created: If you think they look basically the same, you got the point. Now look at the data on the maps. The original map displays the proportion of...
Reader/friend Tom B. knows about my interest in grade "deflation" policies, and proceeds to ruin my breakfast by sending me a link to this ludicrous "letter to the editor" by a high-school counsellor (link). It starts with a made-up assertion: As the new academic term starts, I’m rooting for this to be the year when students start getting the grades they rightfully earn without high schools and colleges manipulating numbers…
I wished I had a chance to take Gene Woolsey's class. Woolsey was a major personality in Operations Research, and from reading a set of remembrances in ORMS Today (June 2015), I learned that he was also an amazing teacher. And no one in his class made spelling errors! How cool is that. Well, I don't know if no one ever made a spelling error but I bet that the…
Surveys generate a lot of data. And, if you have used a survey vendor, you know they generate a ton of charts. I was in Germany to attend the Data Meets Viz workshop organized by Antony Unwin. Paul and Sascha...
Registration is open for my dataviz workshop at NYU. (link) This is a workshop in the sense of a creative writing workshop. Your "writing" are sketches of data visualization based on your selected datasets. In class, we critique all of...
This op-ed by Richard Thaler caught my attention because I have a similar experience. In my statistics classes, I have noticed a pattern: if the mid-term exam is hard, with a lower average score (say 75-80%), the students look crestfallen and feel that they did not learn; eventually, when it comes to evaluating the instructor, I receive lower grades, with comments indicating that I have not taught them properly to…
