Classes 3-7 July 2017: We have updated our very popular training course to take advantage of the latest Microsoft Advanced Analytics technology and re-launched it as Marketing Analytics using Microsoft R and Azure. We have just announced public training dates and are looking forward to giving the course in the week 3... [Read more...]

The first part of our Marketing Analytics Using R course covers campaign analysis with test- and control groups and campaign optimisation using lift curves and predicted responses. Among the many topics covered, we discuss what is wrong with lift curves. They are a standard tool in marketing to select a ... [Read more...]

How do we know that marketing works? It was National Poetry Day in Britain recently, and I do believe that poetry and imagination, and the wisdom and insights it can bring, has a place in business and corporate world. But wisdom isn’t knowledge; it d... [Read more...]

Back by popular demand! We have been asked many times when we would run again the Marketing Analytics Using R training course. We used to do it with Revolution Analytics which is now part of Microsoft but due to client-side commitments we have not had a public course for 2 years. [Read more...]

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We looked at a rule of thumb for confidence intervals and what that means for a business manager in our previous post. Now we do the maths, stats, and R code for the practitioner. [Read more...]

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Big can be a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference. The gas in the ill-fated Hindenburg airship, the gas that formed our Sun, and the gas that formed the Milky Way galaxy were just lumps of hydrogen atoms (with varying impurities). The difference was in the number of atoms. ... [Read more...]

We continue working our way through the examples, case studies, and exercises of what is affectionately known here as “the two bears book” (Swedish björn = bear) and more formally as Non-Life Insurance Pricing with Generalized Linear Models by Esbjörn Ohlsson and Börn Johansson (Amazon UK | US). At ... [Read more...]

Insurance pricing is backwards and primitive, harking back to an era before computers. One standard (and good) textbook on the topic is Non-Life Insurance Pricing with Generalized Linear Models by Esbjorn Ohlsson and Born Johansson. We have been doing some work in this area recently. Needing a robust internal training ... [Read more...]

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Commercial Analytics is the kind that makes money. From data to dollars, insights to income, this is all about how to run the business better. To do it and to do it well you need certain capabilities in place. This article builds a map of those business capabilities to help ... [Read more...]

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Because it is Friday and because we collect quotes: If mathematics is the handmaiden of science, statistics is the whore: all that scientists are looking for is a quick fix without the encumbrance of a meaningful relationship. Statisticians are second-class mathematicians, third-rate scientists and fourth-rate thinkers. They are the hyenas, ... [Read more...]

For my sins, I have done more than my fair share of analysis in Excel. I am quite capable of building and maintaining 130Mb spreadsheets (I had a dozen of them for one client). Excel is pretty much installed everywhere, so it is sometimes the only way to get started ... [Read more...]

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Feature selection is the data mining process of selecting the variables from our data set that may have an impact on the outcome we are considering. For commercial data mining, which is often characterised by having too many variables for model building, this is an important step in the analysis ... [Read more...]