sagesraka.blogg.se - Data insights

#Data insights update
#Data insights skin

Is there anything that doesn’t match? Anything that makes you go “That’s odd” or “That doesn’t make any sense.”? Make plots, do summaries, whatever is needed to see if it matches your expectations. Such a list is essentially a prediction based on your current understanding of the business. Repeat the cycle.ĭata scientists and analysts can do the same thing.īefore you explore the data, write down a short list of what you expect to see in the data: the distribution of key variables, the relationships between important pairs of them, and so on.

#Data insights update

If not, they dig into what’s going on and update their understanding (“modify the theory”). Then they check the data ( sometimes setting up elaborate experiments to generate the data) to see if it matches their predictions. Using their current understanding of how the system works (“theory”), they make certain predictions. So the search for insight can be thought of as the effort to understand how something complicated really works by analyzing its data.īut this is the sort of thing that scientists do! The world is unbelievably complex and they have a tried-and-tested playbook to gradually increase our understanding of it - the Scientific Method. Or, to borrow an analogy from Andy Grove’s High Output Management, complex systems are black-boxes and an insight is like a window cut into the side of the black box that “sheds light” on what’s going on inside. It bridges the gap between how you think the system works and how it really works. Given this, you can think of an “insight” as anything that increases your understanding of how the system actually works.

Any data you have about the business describes some aspect of the behavior of this complex system.

And since the business keeps changing, this gap is always getting bigger. Even for experienced employees, there’s a gap between their understanding of the business and how it actually works.

Every business can be thought of as a complicated system with many moving parts.

Here’s one way that I have found to be useful. I am sure experienced practitioners have evolved many ways to do this. This is a difficult question and it doesn’t have a single, perfect answer.

#Data insights skin

In this situation, there are numerous ways to skin the cat and it is data science heaven.īut often they are simply asked to “mine the data and tell me something interesting”. Sometimes they are lucky - they may be asked to solve a very specific and well-studied problem (e.g., predict which customer is likely to cancel their mobile contract).

Their bosses are under pressure to show some ROI from all the money that has been spent on systems to collect, store and organize the data (not to mention the money being spent on data scientists). It is typically asked by starting data scientists, analysts and managers new to data science.