2020-11-06 13:00
As someone who has successfully implemented a major management reform across the entire federal government, I consider innovating in government to be one of the highest callings of civil s… Read More
Blog Directory > Business Blogs > Elder Research Data Science & Machine Learning Blog business Blog >
Elder Research Data Science & Machine Learning Blog Blog
elderresearch.com/blog
Blogarama's Sponsor
Tags:
government
created
successful
unemployment insurance
generator
heart disease
natural language processing
tool
recidivism
union
Blog covers data science topics, analytics tips and best practices, careers in data science, modeling techniques, case studies and analytics industry trends.
2020-10-23 12:00
Models make predictions by identifying consistent correlations in what has been observed, but we usually require more than predictions to know what action we should take. For example, know… Read More
2020-10-16 12:00
Like a house built to withstand the seasons, a successful and sustainable analytics project must start with a firm foundation, a purposeful plan, a seasoned team, and the right tools and m… Read More
2020-10-01 13:08
As the Chief Data Officer (CDO) role gets established at each federal agency as required by the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Public Law 115-435) (Evidence Act), I can’t h… Read More
2020-09-18 12:00
Elder Research has extensive experience helping enterprises find and eliminate fraud, waste and abuse (FWA). For several state-level labor departments, we have assisted with identifying fr… Read More
2020-09-04 12:00
As COVID-19 began to take off in the U.S. early this year, federal, state, and county governments hurried to contain it. Policies restricting movement, closing businesses, etc., have becom… Read More
2020-08-21 12:00
The blog Recidivism, and the Failure of AUC published on Statistics.com showed how the use of “Area Under the Curve” (AUC) concealed bias against African-Americans defendants i… Read More
2020-08-07 12:00
In early 2020, Sira-Kvina Kraftselskap, a large producer of hydroelectric power in Norway, suffered a breakdown of one of its major generators. Company technicians went through established… Read More
2020-07-24 12:00
Your company has made it a strategic priority to become more data-driven. Good! A major anticipated component of this transition is to implement new data technology (e.g., a data lake). Re… Read More
2020-07-10 12:00
Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence aimed at giving computers the ability to use and understand human language and speech. Technology features we take… Read More
2020-06-26 12:00
The field of data analytics is dynamic with rapidly evolving innovations. To realize the potential of an enterprise-wide analytics program, leaders and managers at all levels need strong d… Read More
2020-06-10 18:00
Will there be a second wave of COVID-19 in the fall? Individuals and organizations are making plans that depend on an answer to that question, and there is much comment in the media… Read More
2020-06-05 12:00
In the midst of the national emergency response to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, United States manufacturers and State governments have been unable to effectively ident… Read More
2020-05-26 14:14
Never before have statistical models received the attention they are getting now in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is hard to read a news feed today without encountering e… Read More
2020-05-19 21:00
By tracking anonymized mobile phone location data and COVID-19 case reports for many countries with different policies, we studied the effect of restricting mobility on the spread of COVID… Read More
2020-05-15 12:00
Data Science project management must be customized to work best with each organization, but we find that our projects are most successful when managed using an Agile + CRISP-DM process rat… Read More
2020-05-07 21:22
We observe a peculiar counter-fluctuation in a COVID-19 statistic -- daily percent changes in deaths; it has a downward trend, but Tuesdays tend to see small increases.
COVID-19 death cou… Read More
2020-04-30 13:54
Although there are frequent reports in the news media of young people contracting serious cases of COVID-19 and even dying, the disease in its serious form is overwhelmingly a disease of o… Read More
2020-04-27 19:16
Three weeks ago, our Brief Is the Spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Being Slowed looked at the impact of social distancing on the flu. Evidence showed that the unprecedented measure… Read More
2020-04-24 12:00
Data analytics is the process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information to support the decision-making process. Every organiz… Read More
2020-04-20 16:33
A key issue for COVID-19 response policies moving forward is the asymptomatic rate - people who have the virus but do not show symptoms. If all the people who get the virus show symp… Read More
2020-04-15 17:17
Nearly everyone is now familiar with the IHME Covid-19 forecasts (also called the “Murray” model after the lead project investigator at the Institute for Health Metrics and Eva… Read More
2020-04-07 22:00
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a need for clear and actionable analytics like never before. The world can’t wait for controlled scientific studies to be completed, or dodge with… Read More
2020-03-27 12:00
Demand for data science services continues to accelerate, which has fueled the rapid development of ever more complex models. That complexity has contributed to the poor application of mod… Read More
2020-03-27 12:00
The story of graph theory gets its beginning in Köenigsberg, Prussia, in the 1700s. In Koenigsberg, there is a church that sits on an island in the middle of the river tha… Read More
2020-03-13 12:00
With more organizations discovering the value of using data science to make better decisions, new opportunities are emerging for Data Engineers to provide support and integration for analy… Read More
2020-02-28 13:00
In 2019, over 40 million Americans wagered money on March Madness brackets, according to the American Gaming Association. Most of this money was bet in “bracket pools,” which c… Read More
2020-02-14 13:00
In December I attended AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services' annual learning conference. It was five days filled with over 4,000 sessions, keynote announcements, a partner expo, and ha… Read More
2020-02-03 13:00
Are you considering investing in sharpening the analytical skills of your staff? Do you wish that your IT, business, marketing, or operations group would more effectively employ pred… Read More
2020-01-17 13:00
In my previous blog, Ensembles and Regularization – Analytics Superheroes, I reviewed the many advantages of model ensembles including removing “noise” variables, general… Read More
2019-12-27 13:00
A casual user of machine learning methods like CART or Naive Bayes is accustomed to evaluating a model by measuring how well it predicts new data. When examining the output of statis… Read More
2019-12-27 13:00
Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have radically changed the landscape of state-of-the-art performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP) within recent years. These versatile models are being u… Read More
2019-12-13 17:25
Data Scientists frequently build Machine Learning models to discover interesting (rare) events in data. These events can be valuable (e.g., customer purchases), costly (e.g., fraud), or ev… Read More
2019-11-29 13:00
I have identified five primary reasons why analytical models fail:
Poor Organizational Support
Missing Causes
Model Overfit
Data Problems
False Beliefs
In this post, we will cons… Read More
2019-11-15 13:00
Reluctance to trust and rely on machine-based decisions is widespread. That is understandable; how can one be sure the automated decision system takes into account all the factors it shoul… Read More
2019-11-01 12:00
There was an interesting article in the New York Times magazine section on the role that Big Data can play in treating patients — discovering things t… Read More
2019-10-18 12:00
Detecting which of the federal government’s millions of contracts1 most likely involve fraud used to require insider access to agencies’ IT systems. Data analytics provides gre… Read More
2019-10-04 12:00
When Apple CEO Tim Cook finally unveiled his company’s new Apple Watch in a widely-publicized rollout, most of the press coverage centered on its cost ($349 to start) and whether it… Read More
2019-09-20 12:00
Government stands to gain $1 trillion globally from using data analytics.1 Few government data teams have the resources to document their value, but those that do can show as much as… Read More
2019-09-06 12:00
Elder Research partnered with Excella Consulting to build an end-to-end grant risk estimation solution in the client’s AWS cloud. It used text mining and document classification to e… Read More
2019-08-23 12:00
I’ve been told that, in conversation, I jump in and finish other people’s sentences for them. Now there’s an app for that: GPT-2 released by OpenAI, founded by Elon Musk… Read More
2019-08-09 12:00
The absolutely coolest thing in science and engineering is machine learning, when computers learn from the experience encoded in data. I shall now support that hypothesis Read More
2019-07-26 12:00
Elder Research has solved many challenging and previously unsolved technical problems in a wide variety of fields for Government, Commercial and Investment clients, including fraud prevent… Read More
2019-07-05 12:00
How do computers optimize mass persuasion – for marketing, presidential campaigns, and even healthcare? And why is there actually no data that directly records influence or persuasio… Read More
2019-06-21 12:00
Perhaps the most active application of analytics and data mining is healthcare. This week we look at one success story, the use of machine learning to predict diabetic retinopathy, o… Read More
2019-06-07 12:00
It has become common to talk about data being the new oil. But a recent piece from WIRED magazine points out problems with this analogy. Primarily, you must extract oil for it to be valuab… Read More
2019-05-24 12:00
One of the most fundamental contributions we can make as consultants is to help our clients ask the right questions of their data. We’re often asked to help solve problems that turn… Read More
2019-05-10 12:00
On Wednesday, March 27, the 2018 Turing Award in computing was given to Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their work on deep learning. Deep learning by complex neural… Read More
2019-04-26 12:00
The company had invested hundreds of millions of dollars investigating a new potential drug to treat a mental ailment, and they had zeroed in on a compound that showed promise but the comp… Read More
2019-04-12 12:00
Join us in Las Vegas on June 16-20 for the largest Predictive Analytics World event to date, Mega-PAW, with seven tracks of sessions covering the commercial deployment of machine lea… Read More
2019-04-05 12:00
Elder Research developed an automated data pipeline to cleanse data and feed a data visualization tool used to identify and explore document preparer network relationships. The solution en… Read More
2019-03-29 12:00
With the right business problem, data, and applied techniques predictive analytics can deliver exceptional return on investment (ROI) by, for example, assessing and managing risk, detectin… Read More
2019-03-22 12:00
In our experience the mistake of “waiting for perfect data” probably kills more projects than any other. Here’s a typical scenario:
The project starts out well. The mana… Read More
2019-03-15 12:00
A significant transformation is currently underway in the lending market. Banks are competing to provide lending decisions in a single day, with a vastly simplified customer experience as… Read More
2019-03-08 13:00
The Risk Assessment Data Repository (RADR) is a powerful risk analytics platform used to enhance productivity in the investigation of fraud, waste and abuse. This server-based, d… Read More
2019-03-01 13:00
As a data science consultancy, we frequently run into difficult data infrastructure challenges at our clients across multiple industries. To solve a business problem or get decision-making… Read More
2019-02-22 13:00
With the news full of so many successes in the fields of analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, it is easy to lose sight of the high failure rate of analytics projects. … Read More
2019-02-15 13:00
When an organization invests in data science, they need to have confidence that the predictive models will be robust; that is, actually work when applied to future cases. However, this… Read More
2019-02-08 13:00
Mike Thurber, Lead Data Scientist and fraud specialist at Elder Research, presented Elder Research's fraud detection methodology at Predictive Analytics World for Government last yea… Read More
2019-02-01 13:00
The Nash Equilibrium—see A Beautiful Mind—in economics and game theory is defined as a stable state of a system involving multiple participants, where no one can gain by a chan… Read More
2019-01-25 13:00
In the visualization below, which line do you think represents the United Nation’s forecast for the number of children in the world in the year 2100? Read More
2019-01-18 13:00
Analytics and Machine Learning techniques are important decision-making tools. Analytics asks questions from data and gets answers, largely for predicting what is likely to happe… Read More
2019-01-11 13:00
In March 2017, President Trump established the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. In October 2017 Eric D. Hargan, Acting Secretary of Health an… Read More
2018-12-21 13:00
In one recent week, I heard about the need for increased “data literacy” from executives at a major insurance company, leaders at a large consumer packaged goods manufacturer… Read More
2018-12-14 13:00
Good data scientists are hard to find! This is in spite of the rapid growth of University master’s degree programs and commercial boot camps. Those sources do produce a much-needed s… Read More
2018-12-07 13:00
I’ve long heard that “a watched pot never boils,” but when I am heavily invested in the outcome of a process, I still tend to monitor it intently. In my impatience I begi… Read More
2018-11-30 13:00
I had one hard requirement during my job search: wherever I ended up, I wanted to drink from the "data science firehose." I wanted to work alongside seasoned data scientists with diverse s… Read More
2018-11-16 13:00
One of the most consequential and valuable analytical tools in business is simulation, which helps us make decisions in the face of uncertainty Read More
2018-11-02 12:00
This blog is 3rd in a series of short posts where we explore common biases that can impair analytics projects Read More
2018-10-26 12:00
Understanding the organization’s business objectives and requirements, converting this knowledge into a definition of a problem, and developing a preliminary plan to solve that problem… Read More
2018-10-19 12:00
In his Top 10 Data Mining Mistakes Dr. John Elder shares lessons learned from more than 20 years of data science consulting experience. Avoiding these mistakes are cornerstone… Read More
2018-10-12 12:00
Fraud detection is about finding needles in haystacks and requires reliably labeled instances of fraudulent (needle) and non-fraudulent (straw) behavior. A predictive model can be trained… Read More
2018-10-05 12:00
In the earliest days of data analytics, our new clients would typically say, “Solve this problem for us.” As they saw the enduring power of analytics, their request then became… Read More
2018-09-28 12:00
For many students, statistics is a troublesome subject, and the root of that trouble can be traced to the concept of the null hypothesis. In these days of big data, machine learning, and p… Read More
2018-09-14 12:00
Predictive Analytics World for Government, the premier analytics and AI conference for government, starts next week. Keynote speakers include David Williams, USPS Board of Governors, Tom D… Read More
2018-09-07 12:00
My job as a data scientist and research strategist is getting easier. Over the past 50 years, statisticians have developed a number of practical models that are highly effective to explain… Read More
2018-08-31 12:00
I got my introduction to statistics via resampling, working with Julian Simon, an early resampling pioneer. Demonstrating this "brute force" computer method to my father, I saw that he w… Read More
2018-08-24 12:00
In the midst of a recent engagement an executive suddenly asked, “Are we using Machine Learning?”. This caught us off-guard; working in the field for many years, we use the &ld&hellip…Read More
2018-08-17 12:00
Recent research supported by the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) (and other benefactors) collected multifaceted data sets from patients with Parkinson’s Disease. They wanted to &hellip…Read More
2018-08-10 12:00
In his Top 10 Data Mining Mistakes Dr. John Elder shares lessons learned from more than 20 years of data science consulting experience. Avoiding these mistakes are cornerstone… Read More
2018-08-03 12:00
Elder Research implemented an automated framework for time-series forecasting at a major logistics company. Our system, combining R and Apache Spark™, produces 35 million forecasts i… Read More
2018-07-27 12:00
Is the Normal Curve Normal?I saw an article recently that referred to the normal curve as the data scientist's best friend, and it is certainly true that the normal distribution is ubiquit… Read More
2018-07-20 12:00
The hype around “the thinking sciences” — Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science — is enormous, so it’s tempting to be skeptical of the r… Read More
2018-07-13 12:00
Viral respiratory illnesses can be particularly challenging for people with asthma. A cold or flu can lead to acute respiratory complications or even death in asthmatics. Elder Resear… Read More
2018-07-06 12:00
Algorithmic bias is a popular topic; see for example this article describing how Microsoft is working on a dashboard product to detect unfair bias in algorithms. When a typical person (not… Read More
2018-06-29 12:00
Since its founding more than twenty years ago Elder Research has been involved in hundreds of data mining projects. Most of those projects employ numerical data, but for about a decade now… Read More
2018-06-22 12:00
Data can appear lifeless and dull on the surface—especially government data—but the thought of it should actually get you excited. Data is the very most interesting and powerfu… Read More
2018-06-15 12:00
According to Women in Tech: The Facts, a report by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), “In 2015, women held 57% of all professional occ… Read More
2018-06-01 12:00
The only conference of its kind, Predictive Analytics World for Government advances the deployment of analytics within federal, state and local government -- to drive smarter decisions, au… Read More
2018-05-25 12:00
As outlined in Developing an Analytics Strategy: The Role of Culture, there are five facets to “cultural infrastructure” that organizations must address to realize the fu… Read More
2018-05-25 12:00
As outlined in Developing an Analytics Strategy: The Role of Culture, there are five facets to “cultural infrastructure” that organizations must address to realize the fu… Read More
2018-05-18 12:00
This year there will be only ONE Predictive Analytics World conference in the U.S. Billed as Mega-PAW, it will be the largest Predictive Analytics World event to date and&n&hell…Read More
2018-05-11 12:00
Healthcare fraud is very difficult to detect because a variety of nuanced methods are employed, investigative evidence is often buried in text documents, and there can be collusion among net… Read More
2018-05-04 12:00
Analytics enables organizations to more effectively accomplish their mission by revealing new insights that promote better decision-making. When first getting an analytics capability… Read More
2018-04-27 12:00
Increasing numbers of mid-size and larger companies have seen the worth of analytics and are trying to build in-house data science teams to capitalize on the value of their data assets… Read More
2018-04-20 12:00
Crowdsourcing, a combination of “crowd” and “outsourcing” first coined by Wired magazine in 2005 and fueled by the Internet, is a powerful sourcing model that… Read More
2018-04-13 12:00
Elder Research will participate in the 7th annual Analytics Summit 2018, Hosted by The University of Cincinnati Center for Business Analytics on May 14th-16th, 2018 at the Sharonville Conv… Read More
2018-04-06 12:00
Data wrangling is the process of gathering, selecting, and transforming data to answer an analytical question. Also known as data cleaning or “munging”, legend has it tha… Read More
2018-03-30 12:00
If your organization is new to data science and predictive analytics, it can be difficult to know where to start. In our two decades of experience at Elder Research, we have found that the… Read More
2018-03-23 12:00
The U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system is run and funded primarily by the individual states with oversight and support from the U.S. Department of Labor. Individual state UI programs… Read More
Subscribe to Elder Research Data Science & Machine Learning Blog
Get updates delivered right to your inbox!