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

Factor analysis: This statistical technique helps identify clusters of similar customers (see Chapter 4) and similar response patterns from survey results (see Chapter 9).

PA actually “rolls up,” learning patterns that hold true in general by way of rote number crunching across the masses of customer records.

its very design, PA fosters serendipity. Predictive modeling conducts a broad, exploratory analysis, testing many predictors, and in so doing uncovers surprising findings, such as vegetarians being less likely to miss flights and other such predictive results listed in the tables earlier in this chapter.