Tag: blog

Tale of Two Analytical Interfaces

Occam’s razor (or Ockham’s razor[1]) is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae(translating to the law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness). The principle is popularly summarized as “the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one.

Using a simple screenshot- you can see Facebook Analytics for a Facebook page is simpler at explaining who is coming to visit rather than Google Analytics Dashboard (which has not seen the attention of a Visual UI or Graphic Redesign)

And if Facebook is going to take over the internet, well it is definitely giving better analytics in the process. What do you think?

Which Interface is simpler- and gives you better targeting. Ignore the numbers and just see the metrics measured and the way they are presented. Coincidently R is used at Facebook a lot (which has given the jjplot package)- and Google has NOT INVESTED MAJOR MONEY in creating Premium R Packages or Big Data Packages. I am talking investment at the scale Google is known for- not measly meetups.

(the summer of code dont count- it is for students mostly)

(but thanks for the Pizza G Men- and maybe revise that GA interface by putting a razor to some metrics)

GA vs Facebook Analytics

 

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Who searches for this Blog?

Statue of Michael Jackson in Eindhoven, the Ne...
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Using WP- Stats I set about answering this question-

What search keywords lead here-

Clearly Michael Jackson is down this year

And R GUI, Data Mining is up.

How does that affect my writing- given I get almost 250 visitors by search engines alone daily- assume I write nothing on this blog from now on.

It doesnt- I still write what ever code or poem that comes to my mind. So it is hurtful people misunderstimate the effort in writing and jump to conclusions (esp if I write about a company- I am not on payroll of that company- just like if  I write about a poem- I am not a full time poet)

Over to xkcd

All Time (for Decisionstats.Wordpress.com)

Search Views
libre office 818
facebook analytics 806
michael jackson history 240
wps sas lawsuit 180
r gui 168
wps sas 154
wordle.net 118
sas wps 116
decision stats 110
sas wps lawsuit 100
google maps jet ski 94
data mining 88
doug savage 72
hive tutorial 63
spss certification 63
hadley wickham 63
google maps jetski 62
sas sues wps 60
decisionstats 58
donald farmer microsoft 45
libreoffice 44
wps statistics 44
best statistics software 42
r gui ubuntu 41
rstat 37
tamilnadu advanced technical training institute tatti 37

YTD

2009-11-24 to Today

Search Views
libre office 818
facebook analytics 781
wps sas lawsuit 170
r gui 164
wps sas 125
wordle.net 118
sas wps 101
sas wps lawsuit 95
google maps jet ski 94
data mining 86
decision stats 82
doug savage 63
hadley wickham 63
google maps jetski 62
hive tutorial 56
donald farmer microsoft 45
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Quantifying Analytics ROI

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I had a brief twitter exchange with Jim Davis, Chief Marketing Officer, SAS Institute on Return of Investment on Business Analytics Projects for customers. I have interviewed Jim Davis before last year https://decisionstats.com/2009/06/05/interview-jim-davis-sas-institute/

Now Jim Davis is a big guy, and he is rushing from the launch of SAS Institute’s Social Media Analytics in Japan- to some arguably difficult flying conditions in time to be home in America for Thanksgiving. That and and I have not been much of a good Blog Boy recently, more swayed by love of open source, than love of software per se. I love equally, given I am bad at both equally.

Anyways, Jim’s contention  ( http://twitter.com/Davis_Jim ) was customers should go in business analytics only if there is Positive Return on Investment.  I am quoting him here-

What is important is that there be a positive ROI on each and every BA project. Otherwise don’t do it.

That’s not the marketing I was taught in my business school- basically it was sell, sell, sell.

However I see most BI sales vendors also go through -let me meet my sales quota for this quarter- and quantifying customer ROI is simple maths than predictive analytics but there seems to be some information assymetry in it.

Here is a paper from North Western University on ROI in IT projects-.

but overall it would be in the interest of customers and Business Analytics Vendors to publish aggregated ROI.

The opponents to this transparency in ROI would be market leaders in market share, who have trapped their customers by high migration costs (due to complexity) or contractually.

A recent study listed Oracle having a large percentage of unhappy customers who would still renew!, SAP had problems when it raised prices for licensing arbitrarily (that CEO is now CEO of HP and dodging legal notices from Oracle).

Indeed Jim Davis’s famous unsettling call for focusing on Business Analytics,as Business Intelligence is dead- that call has been implemented more aggressively by IBM in analytical acquisitions than even SAS itself which has been conservative about inorganic growth. Quantifying ROI, should theoretically aid open source software the most (since they are cheapest in up front licensing) or newer technologies like MapReduce /Hadoop (since they are quite so fast)- but I think that market has a way of factoring in these things- and customers are not as foolish neither as unaware of costs versus benefits of migration.

The contrary to this is Business Analytics and Business Intelligence are imperfect markets with duo-poly  or big players thriving in absence of customer regulation.

You get more protection as a customer of $20 bag of potato chips, than as a customer of a $200,000 software. Regulators are wary to step in to ensure ROI fairness (since most bright techies are qither working for private sector, have their own startup or invested in startups)- who in Govt understands Analytics and Intelligence strong enough to ensure vendor lock-ins are not done, and market flexibility is done. It is also a lower choice for embattled regulators to ensure ROI on enterprise software unlike the aggressiveness they have showed in retail or online software.

Who will Analyze the Analysts and who can quantify the value of quants (or penalize them for shoddy quantitative analytics)- is an interesting phenomenon we expect to see more of.

 

 

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Cartoons on R

The 50 million R Community needs to have atleast 1 R Cartoonist. Ergo, this week in R-

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https://decisionstats.com/2010/11/16/dirk-and-jd-swoon-about-ajay-in-room-106-while-writing-r-code/

Why do bloggers blog ?

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Step 1 is to create internal motivation to create a blog in the first place

Step 2 is to find what to write

Reasons Bloggers Blog-

Basic -Ranting


Examples- I hate Facebook Platform team treats me badly with waits, and breaks my code.

SAS Marketing wont give me  a big discount to make me look good in front of my boss.

Companies  wont give me their software for free- even though I will use it to make money (and not play X Box)

I want my vendors to be FOSS but my customers to switch to SaaS.

Google wont do this- Apple wont do that- Microsoft wont do those.

Revolution would give me 4 great packages but not the open source for RevoScaler (which only 300 people would understand in the first place)

Safety-

I better kiss the Professor and give a Turkey for dinner, as he sits on my thesis committee.

I will recommend Prof X’s lousy book in the hope he recommends my lousy book as a textbook too.

It is safe to laugh when the boss is making a joke-I should comment on her corporate blog, and retweet her.

Belonging-

I belong to this great online community of smart people. Let me agree to what they say.

I really believe in EVERYTHING that ALL the 2 MILLION members of the community have to say ALL the TIME.

I belong to this online community because all my friends are on my computer.

4 Egositic

My blog page rank is now X plus delta tau because of sugary key words (2004)

My technorati numbers rise (2005)

I was once on Digg (2007)

I have Z * exp N followers on Twitter and even more on Facebook (2008)

My Klout is increasing on twitter, My stack overflow reputation ‘s cup floweth over. (2009)

My Karma on Reddit is more important than my Karma in real life (2010)

Self Actualization-

I got time to kill- and I think I may learn more, meet intersting people and discover something wandering on the internet.

All those who wonder are not lost- Wikiquote

I got a story to tell, poems to write, code to give away. A free  Blog is something a Chinese , an Iranian  and a North korean really really know what the value is.

But after all that, WHY Do Bloggers Blog?

  • Because we are still waiting for Facebook to create the Blog Killer.
  • Its better than saying I am unemployed and a social loner
  • Reddit Karma feels good. Any Karma of any kind.
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Zen and the art of applying T tests to Spam Data

Decisionstats traffic seemed up mmm but Spam is way way up

Whos spamming my dear bloggie

hmm

is it the russians doing a link spam. unlikely they dont bot against Akismet that much (as they fail)

And Captcha can be failed by python (apparently. sigh)

Is there a co relation of certain tags of posts, and count of spam- hoping to distort say blogs’s search engine rankings for SAS WPS Lawsuit in Google or jet ski across  pacific in Google.

Sigh- an old retired outlaw black hat is never kept in peace. Try doing a blog search for R in Google- Revo  is now down to number 7 (which is hmm given Google Instant)

Of course I think too much about SEO, but I dont run CPC ads- I made much more money when traffic is low – say 5-10 small businesses needing to forecast their sales .

and enjoy your Thanksgiving. Remember the Indians bring the Turkeys.

 

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