Dating Sites Try Adaptive Matchmaking - Technology Review

Dating Sites Try Adaptive Matchmaking - Technology Review

Teradata to acquire Aprimo for $525 million :: BtoB Magazine#seenit#seenit#seenit#seenit

Teradata finally catches up with IBM's UNICA acquisiton

Teradata to acquire Aprimo for $525 million :: BtoB Magazine#seenit#seenit#seenit#seenit

Using a Computer to Fight Medicare Fraud - WSJ.com

A very interesting article in the WSJ on how data mining techniques are being used to fight medicare fraud.

The California example in the article is particularly interesting --- very similar to work done in the credit card space.


Using a Computer to Fight Medicare Fraud - WSJ.com

AOL Buys about.me, the Personal Analytics and Social Content Site

AOL Buys about.me, the Personal Analytics and Social Content Site

Hearst Challenge Update

The Hearst challenge session at the NCDM2010 conference went off very well yesterday!  The three finalist teams, MIRACLE ( Xiaoshi Lu),  One Million Monkeys ( Eric Jackson)  and A^3 ( Aleksey Fadeev, Aleksey Ashkimin and Arthur Abdullin) did an excellent job with the presentations! All finalists we represented with  beautiful crafted crystal trophies from Tiffany. 

Congratulations to A^3 for winning the grand prize of $25,000!


Here are some details  on the tools and techniques used by the participants:

Looking forward to next years competition!

--Datamining_guy

Foursquare looks to bolster digital marketing capabilities with data mining | RICG

Looks like Foursquare is getting into the Amazon/Netflix type collaborative filtering based recommendations business:



Foursquare looks to bolster digital marketing capabilities with data mining RICG

Civil Liberties and Datamining?

As the use of data mining to make better(or profitable) policy/business decisions is gaining ground, an undercurrent of concerns related to improper use of data is also developing.

I recently posted an article about this on the Analytics Happenings linkedin group, which deals with the controversy related to using data mining for for medical marketing.

Here is another interesting article from The Constitution Project that echoes some of these concerns.

Basically, there is call the have civil liberties and privacy law concerns baked into policy related data mining


Opposites Agree on Data Mining's Importance and the Need for Controls Security Management

For those working in lending or insurance industries, the call for these restrictions might not be anything new, as some of are already in place there.

However, I hope this undercurrent of concern does not slow down or kill the adoption of analytics in newer areas.

Here is the link the original report: 

http://www.constitutionproject.org/pdf/DataMiningPublication.pdf

The Best Web Analytics Software Ranked by topseos.com for December 2010

The Best Web Analytics Software Ranked by topseos.com for December 2010

Can Crowdsourcing be an alternative to traditional Consulting?

During the course of Hearst challenge, several acquaintances  have commented on the beauty of the  analytics competition business model? Putting up amounts which are significantly less than normal consulting fees, companies can get large number of people to work on a problem that is of interest to them.

While a lot of this is true, I do see some drawbacks of the  competition or crowd sourcing approach:

• To the extent organizations invest in  analytics to gain a competitive advantage,  the crowd sourcing approach has a disadvantage that it is harder to keep a secret in a crowd. You might swear the winner to secrecy, but what about the guy who almost won?
• Data  confidentiality is another issue. As a consultant, I have always seen clients being very sensitive to giving others access to their own data. Therefore,  they will be very reluctant to post really sensitive or important data in a public forum
• Another problem with the crowd sourcing model is that it is a winner(s) take all system, putting  a lot of risk on the participant. for example, 750 teams participated in the Hearst Challenge and put in 6 weeks of effort, but only 1 will get the $25k prize.  Therefore, for someone to be willing to put in that kind of effort, they must be either doing it part time  in spare time, or just starting out. So majority of  full time participants in these competitions are likely to be students or organizations looking to make a name for themselves. This  might have scalability.

These drawbacks do not mean that this is not a viable way of solving business problems. Just that some more thinking and improvisation might be needed to make it scalable, or else it might just be a niche strategy --but definitely a very enticing one.

--Datamining_guy