Handling Secrets
There’s an article in The New York Times today, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” which offers a lot of insight into how practical predictive models are built, as well as how we need to put thought into how to integrate those models into daily business.
The predictive modeling theme is buried in with a lot of material about habit, neuroscience and how the author lost weight. If your interest is in analytics, you can just skim, maybe even skip all of that. Concentrate on the business process – Target wanted to build its shopper base, more shoppers, more often, buying more things. They knew that shoppers change habits during certain life changing events, and the biggest of these is the birth of a child. So they used their data to look for hints that a customer might be pregnant.
Read the article to learn more about the data exploration, interesting findings, and right and wrong ways to put model predictions into everyday use.
Date: February 16, 2012
