afterall, ROI is nothing more a profitability measure.
The evil of ROI is that it is replacing Decision Sceince, it gives all the idiots an excuse for pretending to be able to make good decision without knowing what is good — well, at least in some cases.
Never mind.
There are many forms of NFL theorem. I particularly like the one when applied to optimization/search algorithm. In one version, it can be stated as ” all algorithms that search for an extremum of a cost function perform exactly the same, when averaged over all possible cost functions. In particular, if algorithm A outperforms algorithm B on some cost functions, then loosely speaking there must exist exactly as many other functions where B outperforms A.” [Wolpert and Macready (1995)], see also No Free Lunch Theorem
It is a humbling experience when meditating on it, to be reminded of the importance of contextual knowledge of the problem.
Disclaimer:
I have never been a saleman in my whole life, even for a day.
– in random order …
* no rush in presentation
* being flashy is less important then being helpful
* no bs, particularly when intellectually challenged
* honesty is your best friend
– selling is a process of finding/gaining an advocate on the client side.
Google's tool for viewing trends of search: http://www.google.com/trends
You can do comparison too. Here's what I tried:
republican, democrat (and democrat, republican)
regression model,decision tree,neural networks,support vector machine
response model, risk model, predictive model
intelligence,wisdom,smart,knowledge
harvard, yale, stanford
china,india (within US, Germany, United Kingdom)
buddism,taoism,hinduism,judaism,christian,islam
data mining, statistical analysis, analytics
I have never read anything like it before, and well, that’s probably because I do not read much either. It is thought stimulating, or I should say sometimes thought provoking.
I am refering to Harvard Business Review.
The name Datarologist was born quietly, with no fanfair, announcement or celebration.
Before we have datarologist, it was called many names: statistician, data analyst, data miner, modeler, etc. and the art of trade is called similarly: statistics, data mining, pattern recognization, artificial intelligence, informatics …
The common part that they all share isn’t incidental. On the contrary, the flourish of all of the different fields are pretty much driven by This common, shared element: the skills, the knowledge, the art of trade that able to read relevant insights from data.
子曰: “名不正则言不顺；言不顺则事不成”
(“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” — Analects by Confucius, Chapter 13 )
I smile when reading job reqirement on KDD website. The titles are so varied while the skills are so similar: ) I often felt the pain of the writers. They could have just write: Opening position for a level 5 datarologist!
Analytics Strategist 