Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics

If we had copious data, drawn from a perfectly representative sample, completely mistake-free, and representing exactly what we’re trying to evaluate, then using the most complex model available would indeed be the best approach.

Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the s