Big Data, Plainly Spoken (aka Numbers Rule Your World)

What is Numbersense about?

Michael Elves interviews me for UMFM, the University of Manitoba radio station. We chatted at length about pretty much all the different chapters of Numbersense. He was very interested in the fantasy football materials since the draft is happening this week. You can hear the interview at 11:30 am CST on Thursday Aug 29. Michael tells me a recording will be made available later.

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JMP will be giving away copies of Numbersense. In this interview, they asked me what problems statistics can't solve. Read my answer here.

 

 

Round up of book news

Here are links to coverage of Numbersense.

David Walker and I debate whether statisticians should be a part of Big Data in Significance. (link - requires registration). Significance is a joint publication of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association, and a great source of applied statistics. Walker fears Big Data is pure froth while I outline several problems in which statisticians can play a key role.

Princeton Alumni Weekly featured Numbersense on its book blog

Joe Dager (Business 901) has posted a two-part podcast: Part 1, Part 2

The recording of my webinar on Big Data and Marketing is here.

For those shopping at Barnes and Noble, Numbersense is inexplicably and incorrectly classified as "business reference". I have had no luck so far getting either McGraw-Hill or B&N to classify the book properly.

 

 

Big Data and Marketing

In Chicago, I spoke about the impact of Big Data on marketing. I was going to summarize the key points here but then I noticed that Chris Rollyson has already done the work, and did a much better job than I can. Here are his copious notes.

One question from the audience that I didn't address fully was the use of data in education. I got as far as the farce of "value-added models" in measuring teacher performance. In addition to numerous statistical problems (see here for example), the most basic problem is using inappropriate data. Standardized tests are designed specifically to measure student aptitude, and not teacher performance. One of my points yesterday is that bad data is worse than no data.

VAM is a great case study for how not to use Big Data. The logic of the proponents seems to be: we need to measure teacher performance. We have some observational data (test scores) lying around that may be somewhat related. It's better than nothing. It's a huge data set so it must be useful. We know it's observational data, but if we control for every conceivable thing, we should be fine.

Unfortunately, this kind of attitude is prevalent in the Big Data industry. If there is data, there must be something interesting in the data. Except that what's typically interesting is the realization that the way the data was collected has so many flaws that nothing useful could be conceived from it.

My advice is to make your own data. In the case of measuring teacher performance, rather than take useless test score data, come up with some hypotheses, and go out and collect the data needed to prove/disprove those.

Measuring teacher performance can be framed as a reverse causal problem (see my post here and Gelman's original post.) If I hold my nose and accept test scores as a measure of the output of teachers, then the first-order problem is to explain why performance varies. We can come up with a lot of different hypotheses, and test them.

Alternatively, to the extent possible, we should run experiments to learn things like does the average student learn more using traditional boring method of teaching math or using New Math. This is the forward causal question.

The good folks at Observational Epidemiology may have misunderstood my Moneyball analogy (link). They promise to clarify what they mean later. I'll respond when that happens.

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For those still wondering what Numbersense is about, Bob Morris wrote a detailed review (link). Here is his conclusion:

I agree with Fung that the need to develop NUMBERSENSE is more urgent now than ever before as what was once characterized as an information blizzard has since become a data tsunami. Here in a single volume is about all the information, insights, and counsel anyone needs to do that.

Some interviews, and an event

Here are two recent profiles of me:

Oracle's Profit: "Beyond Big Data" (link)

ASA News (link)

In the second one, they asked me to give advice to people who are interested in getting into data visualization. Here is my answer:

Keep sketching, and keep trashing.

Settle your story and then find the tools, never the other way around.

Hate the default.

Imagine your audience.

If you don’t have an audience, find one.

Inspect your data.

Have a point of view.

Keep a portfolio.

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Next Tuesday, I will be speaking at BIG Frontier in Chicago on Big Data and marketing. Free admission. You can register here.

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The second book giveaway is still open. Try your luck here.

Chance to ask me a question this Friday

I will be at Book Expo this Friday signing books at the McGraw-Hill booth. If you're in NYC, drop by and say hi between 11 and 12.

Yes, it's a new book!  The title is Numbersense: How to Use Big Data to Your Advantage (link). If you read my blogs, you already know where I'm going with this. How can we be smart consumers of data analyses in a world overflowing with data? It will be in stores in July. Between now and then, you can come back here to learn more.

Also, at 12:30, I'll be interviewed at the Shindig event by Peggy Sanservieri, who blogs at Huffington Post on book marketing. This is an online live chat event. Go to their site to register, and you'd have the opportunity to ask me questions.

(This is cross-posted on both blogs.)

Getting inside my head

Some interviews with me or snippets of such have surfaced recently. Here is a list:

Kate Meersschaert interviewed me for New Learning Times (link; registration required). I talked about my teaching philosophy, and why I write books.

Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who keeps an interesting blog, recommends Numbers Rule Your World, and a few other books for political scientists (link).

If you haven't heard already, 2013 is the International Year of Statistics. I was one of the talking heads here.

Here, I talk about the history of Junk Charts, and the new paradigm of interactively building graphs, as opposed to the template paradigm popularized by Excel.

 

Talk at Purdue

I will be giving a talk at Purdue University on Wednesday afternoon, 4:30 pm. The details can be found here. I am hosted by the Math Department in Lawson, Room 1142.

The general theme is the real-world challenges of "Big Data". After the talk, I'll discuss the business analytics career.

Please drop by if you are in the area.

 

Speaking analytics

I was a guest on the Analytically Speaking series, organized by JMP. In this webcast (link, registration required), I talk about the coexistence of data science and statistics, why my blog is called "Junk Charts", what I look for in an analytics team, the tension between visualization and machine algorithms, two modes of statistical modeling, and other things analytical.

Reading guides for instructors, book clubs, etc.

I want to point your attention to recent coverage of Numbers Rule Your World in Chance News. If you are using my book for class or a book club, their writeups act well as reading guides for several chapters.

Notes on Chapter 1 (ramp meters)

Notes on Chapter 3 (hurricanes, test bias) and Chapter 4 (drug testing)

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Chance News has been an extremely valuable resource for statistics teachers for years. They pick up news stories and interesting items, ask intriguing questions but don't offer answer keys. Most of the questions are open-ended, which is as most statistics questions are. We owe much gratitude to the volunteers who have kept the site alive all these years.

 

Now coming to your local bookstore

Numbers Rule Your World has been translated to several languages and is on sale in several countries. Interestingly, the book is coming out with different titles and book covers.

In order of appearance:

Japan:

Apparently, the title translates to "Dope Statistics", and there is a series of Japanese books called "Dope Economics", etc. The color scheme and cover art are similar to the English edition. Here is Amazon.jp link.

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Korea:

They chose an orange cover, with a wind-up figure marching to a rhythm. Google Translate can't handle the title but the subtitle seems to say "Numbers you should dominate." It is on sale here.

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Chinese:

The title is a mouthful: "Think like a statistician: 10 statistical concepts that allow you to think clearly and improve your lives." You can get it from here or here or here. Commercial Times recommends it.

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Portuguese (Brazil):

The Brazilian edition just got published by VS Editora Ltda. It's available here and here. The publisher tells me the cover art was selected by readers of their blog. They went for no-nonsense, a striking blue color.