Accenture Recruitment Talk Rescheduled

The Accenture recruitment talk has been rescheduled from Monday the 5th of December to Monday the 12th of December. It will still take place during the Data Mining class in KE 4-008 at 18:30.

Moneyball

If you haven't heard of it already (from such fabulous blog posts as Damian's), Moneyball is a great film that does a really nice job of showing off what we can do with analytics. It really showed off some of the key steps in an analytics projects:

Business question: win more games with cheap players

Analytics question: which players are most effective at wining games / what are the factors that most influence winning games

Insight: particular metrics (e.g. "getting on base") that baseball scouts etc typically aren't interested in are most effective at predicting wins

Decision: when buying players look for those with good on-base ratings and ignore other distracting factors (e.g. looking good in a uniform)

I also really liked the way they showed that while analytics gave an edge, the team still had to do all of the things that baseball teams do really well in order to be successful. Analytics just gave them an edge. Analytics is amazing, but it is not a silver bullet.

Also, there is a nice article on npr.org that discusses what can be done with data analytics:

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142521910/the-digital-breadcrumbs-that-lead-to-big-data

DT285/DT286 Probability & Statistics Class Cancelled

Hi folks,

The DIT networks have crashed this evening and so it is not possible for students to log on to lab machines. For this reason the DT285/DT286 lab class will be cancelled this evening. Aoife will, however, be present in the Aungier St. lab at 18:30 to answer any questions people have about the assignment.

Apologies for the short notice.

Brian.

Nice Interview with Hal Varian, Chief Economist for Google

techtarget.com had a nice interview a little while ago with Hal Varian, chief economist for Google. In the interview Varian discusses the role of data scientists. I particularly like the question where he lists the skills required for a data scientist:

"Database and data manipulation or how to shuffle data around and move things from place to place; statistics and statistical analysis; machine learning; visualization, or how to present data in a meaningful way; and communication or being able to describe what’s going on."

This is exactly the skillset we are creating on the Msc in Computing (Data Analytics) - in fact the skills almost uncannliy match our module names (http://www.comp.dit.ie/dt285/modules.html)!

The full interview is available at:

http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/news/1280099135/Googles-chief-economist-examines-the-data-scientist-factor

Probability & Statistical Inference Remains in Aungier St

The DT285/DT286 Probability & Statistical Inference will remain in the Aungier St 1-005 Lab tonight (Tuesday 15th of November).

See you there.

Google Prediction API

Google officially launched their Prediction API recently. This is a set of machine learning tools made available as a cloud-based API and the plan at Google is that people will use it to build "smart applications". There's some really nice stuff in there and it appears to make it fairly straight-forward to deploy ML based applications.

More details are available at: http://code.google.com/apis/predict/ and there's a video of their launch event here. It's also worth taking a good look around all of the Google APIs at http://code.google.com/apis/explorer, there's some good stuff in there.

Statistics Class In Aungier St 1-005 Lab

On Tuesday 8th of November Probability & Statistical Inference will return to the Aungier St 1-005 Lab for SAS Enterprise Guide work.

See you there.