In his excellent podcast episode with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer introduces the concept of “fast and frugal trees“. When someone needs to make decisions quickly, Gigerenzer says, they don’t take into account a large number of factors, but instead rely on a small set of thumb rules. The podcast itself is based on…
Liverpool FC: Mid Season Review
After 20 games played, Liverpool are sitting pretty on top of the Premier League with 58 points (out of a possible 60). The only jitter in the campaign so far came in a draw away at Manchester United. I made what I think is a cool graph to put this performance in perspective. I looked…
This year on Spotify
I’m rather disappointed with my end-of-year Spotify report this year. I mean, I know it’s automated analytics, and no human has really verified it, etc. but there are some basics that the algorithm failed to cover. The first few slides of my “annual report” told me that my listening changed by seasons. That in January…
Spurs right to sack Pochettino?
A few months back, I built my “football club elo by manager” visualisation. Essentially, we take the week-by-week Premier League Elo ratings from ClubElo and overlay it with managerial tenures. A clear pattern emerges – a lot of Premier League sackings have been consistent with clubs going down significantly in terms of Elo Ratings. For…
Alchemy
Over the last 4-5 days I kinda immersed myself in finishing Rory Sutherland’s excellent book Alchemy. It all started with a podcast, with Sutherland being the guest on Russ Roberts’ EconTalk last week. I’d barely listened to half the podcast when I knew that I wanted more of Sutherland, and so immediately bought the book…
EPL: Mid-Season Review
Going into the November international break, Liverpool are eight points ahead at the top of the Premier League. Defending champions Manchester City have slipped to fourth place following their loss to Liverpool. The question most commentators are asking is if Liverpool can hold on to this lead. We are two-thirds of the way through the…
Yet another “big data whisky”
A long time back I had used a primitive version of my Single Malt recommendation app to determine that I’d like Ardbeg. Presently, the wife was travelling to India from abroad, and she got me a bottle. We loved it. And so I had screenshots from my app stored on my phone all the time,…
Ganesha Workflow
I have a problem with productivity. It’s because I follow what I call the “Ganesha Workflow”. Basically there are times when I “get into flow”, and at those times I ideally want to just keep going, working ad infinitum, until I get really tired and lose focus. The problem, however, is that it is not…
Segmentation and machine learning
For best results, use machine learning to do customer segmentation, but then get humans with domain knowledge to validate the segments There are two common ways in which people do customer segmentation. The “traditional” method is to manually define the axes through which the customers will get segmented, and then simply look through the data…
Fishing in data pukes
When a data puke is presented periodically, consumers of the puke learn to “fish” for insights in it. I’ve been wondering why data pukes are so common. After all, they need significant effort on behalf of the consumer to understand what is happening, and to get any sort of insight from it. In contrast, a…
Taking Intelligence For Granted
There was a point in time when the use of artificial intelligence or machine learning or any other kind of intelligence in a product was a source of competitive advantage and differentiation. Nowadays, however, many people have got so spoiled by the use of intelligence in many products they use that it has become more…
More on statistics and machine learning
I’m thinking of a client problem right now, and I thought that something that we need to predict can be modelled as a function of a few other things that we will know. Initially I was thinking about it from the machine learning perspective, and my thought process went “this can be modelled as a…
Data, football and astrology
Jonathan Wilson has an amusing article on data and football, and how many data-oriented managers in football have also been incredibly superstitious. This is in response to BT Sport’s (one of the UK broadcasters of the Premier League) announcement of it’s “Unscripted” promotion where “some of the world’s foremost experts in both sports and artificial intelligence…
10X Studs and Fighters
Tech twitter, for the last week, has been inundated with unending debate on this tweetstorm by a VC about “10X engineers”. The tweetstorm was engineered by Shekhar Kirani, a Partner at Accel Partners. I have friends and twitter-followees on both sides of the debate. There isn’t much to describe more about the “paksh” side of…
Periodicals and Dashboards
The purpose of a dashboard is to give you a live view of what is happening with the system. Take for example the instrument it is named after – the car dashboard. It tells you at the moment what the speed of the car is, along with other indicators such as which lights are on,…
Telling stories with data
I’m about 20% through with The Verdict by Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala. It’s a fascinating book, except for one annoyance – it is full of tables that serve no purpose but to break the flow of text. I must mention that I’m reading the book on the Kindle, which means that the tables can pose…
Housewife Careers
This is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a very long time, but have kept putting it off. The ultimate trigger for writing this is this article about women with children in Amazon asking for backup child care at work. Since this hits rather close home, this is a good enough trigger to…
Surveying Income
For a long time now, I’ve been sceptical of the practice of finding out the average income in a country or state or city or locality by doing a random survey. The argument I’ve made is “whether you keep Mukesh Ambani in the sample or not makes a huge difference in your estimate”. So far,…
Vlogging!
The first seed was sown in my head by Harish “the Psycho” J, who told me a few months back that nobody reads blogs any more, and I should start making “analytics videos” to increase my reach and hopefully hit a new kind of audience with my work. While the idea was great, I wasn’t…
The problem with spider charts
On FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver has a piece looking ahead to the Democratic primaries ahead of the presidential elections in the US next year. I don’t know enough about US politics to comment on the piece itself, but what caught my eye is the spider chart describing the various Democratic nominees. This is a standard spider…
Premier League Points Efficiency
It would be tautological to say that you win in football by scoring more goals than your opponent. What is interesting is that scoring more goals and letting in fewer works across games in a season as well, as data from the English Premier League shows. We had seen an inkling of this last year,…