Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight

At a simplistic level, you feed a supervised AI algorithm some historical data, purchases at Target for example, and you tell the algorithm, “Hey, these purchases were from pregnant people, and these other purchases were from not-so-pregnant people.”

And quantifying the forecast uncertainty by creating prediction intervals is invaluable and often ignored in the forecasting world.

media. One example is the congressional discussion around NSA's ability to perform a “three-hop” query—that is go into their network graph of phone call data and find people three hops from a known terrorist (nodes connected to a terrorist by a three edge path in the graph). Whatever your business is, I guarantee you have a graph hiding in your dat

Your goals should be things like using data to facilitate better targeting, forecasting, pricing, decision-making, reporting, compliance, and so on. In other

revealing relationships in your population is useful across industries whether it's for recommending films based on the habits of folks in a taste cluster, identifying crime hot spots within urban areas, or grouping return-related financial investments to ensure a diversified portfolio spans clusters.

These predictors are often called model features or independent variables, while the thing we're trying to predict “Pregnant (yes/no)?” would be the dependent variable in the sense that its value is dependent on the independent variable data we're pushing into the model.

This chapter looks at a set of forecasting techniques called exponential smoothing methods.

All you need to do is when you're done typing the formula, instead of pressing Enter, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. On the Mac, you use Command+Return.

AI is useful across nearly any industry you can think of. Your credit card company uses it to identify odd transactions on your account. The enemy in your shoot-em-up Xbox game runs on AI. There's e-mail spam filtering, tax fraud detection, spelling auto-correction, and friend recommendation on social networks.