Big Data and Fast Frugal Trees

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…