In 2007, Professor James R. Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand made a shocking discovery: as a society, we are getting smarter – IQ test scores and overall intelligence have been trending upwards in a linear fashion since 1930. And not just in any one place in particular, but across the entire world.
Along with this expansion of IQ has come a concomitant increase in our vocabularies; thus, it seems, every year there is some new, trendy buzzword that enters the business lexicon. Last year it was “Big Data” (you probably know the story!). As a population, with our increasing use of the internet, electronic devices, and interaction with others in vast, monitored social networks, we are amassing exponentially-growing troves of data from which, predictably, not many people know how to derive meaningful insights.
That’s where another new addition to our IQ-enhanced lexicon comes in: “Predictive Analytics.” “Predictive Analytics” (let’s call it “PA” for short) attempts to make sense of all that data through advanced statistical and numerical methods like regression modeling, machine learning, data mining, decision trees, and others. It’s the stuff we data nerds just love to geek out on …
It isn’t a particularly new concept. Credit bureaus have cranked out data for years and turned it into credit scores that banks have been using to predict their customer’s future ability to repay a loan. But now, along with the explosion of data, there has come an abundance of novel tools we can use to predict things about customer behavior we couldn’t even have dreamed of doing only ten years ago.
Society as a whole has gotten smarter; it’s now time for business to catch up. So, over the next few months, we’re going to dedicate this space to a series of posts that will help you get smarter about the ways in which PA can help you achieve your business goals in a data-loaded, data-driven world. We’re going to talk about getting started with PA, getting results fast, and taking a deeper dive into your data with more advanced analytic tools. To get started, here’s some homework: check out Eric Siegel’s blog at http://predictiveanalyticsworld.com/blog. He’s a PA guru who used to teach at Columbia and is the founder of Predictive Analytics World, which is fast becoming the industry event for PA pros and their clients.
