some marketing fiercely backfire? Why is human behavior the wrong thing to predict? What should all businesses learn about persuasion from presidential

Given the right set of conditions, the crowd will almost always outperform any number of employees. —Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

Has it learned something true that holds in general, or only discovered patterns that hold within this data set? How can we be confident a model will work tomorrow when it is called upon to predict under unique circumstances never before encountered?

by 2011, there were over 100 million blogs across WordPress and Tumblr alone.

These behaviors are often the most valuable—it’s always a behavior that we seek to predict, and indeed behavior predicts behavior.

called Classification and Regression Trees (CART), employs this elegant form of pruning, plus numerous other bells and whistles in its routines.11 CART was established by a 1984 book of the same name by four legendary researchers from Berkeley and Stanford: Leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman, Charles Stone, and Richard Olshen. I call them the “Fab Four.”

Along the way I noticed a major leak in the boat. Tons of customers were involuntarily canceling due to credit card failures on their monthly or quarterly membership dues.

That’s not the same thing as predicting who will buy because they were contacted;

For example, employees with higher salaries, more raises, and increased performance ratings quit less.