Big data: are we making a big mistake?

Consultants urge the data-naive to wise up to the potential of big data. A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute reckoned that the US healthcare system could save $300bn a year – $1,000 per American – through better integration and analysis of the data produced by everything from clinical trials to health insurance transactions to smart running shoes.

.. when the slow-and-steady data from the CDC arrived, they showed that Google’s estimates of the spread of flu-like illnesses were overstated by almost a factor of two.

The problem was that Google did not know – could not begin to know – what linked the search terms with the spread of flu. Google’s engineers weren’t trying to figure out what caused what.

.. The Literary Digest announced its conclusions: Landon would win by a convincing 55 per cent to 41 per cent, with a few voters favouring a third candidate.

The election delivered a very different result: Roosevelt crushed Landon by 61 per cent to 37 per cent. To add to The Literary Digest’s agony, a far smaller survey conducted by the opinion poll pioneer George Gallup came much closer to the final vote, forecasting a comfortable victory for Roosevelt. Mr Gallup understood something that The Literary Digest did not. When it comes to data, size isn’t everything.

 

The United States of Metrics

Others, though, are concerned. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the statistician and former options trader who wrote the best-selling book “The Black Swan,” about unexpected events, said he believes the current obsession with metrics is a seductive trap.

“The evil here is not having metrics,” he said. “The problem is that you start trying to maximize every metric you have and reduce everything else.”

“As a scientist, I can say that very little is measurable,” he said, “and even those things that are measurable, you cannot trust the measurement beyond a certain point.”

.. Mr. Taleb concurs. There are two schools of thought about metrics, he said. You can optimize everything, or you can do what the ancients did and say, “Good enough.”

Who’s on Third? In Baseball’s Shifting Defenses, Maybe Nobody

Some baseball positions as they have long been known are changing before our eyes. The cause is the infield shift, a phenomenon exploding this year as more teams are using statistical analysis and embracing a dynamic approach to previously static defenses.

.. The Pirates had mostly the same infielders those two years, and in 2012 they turned 339 double plays, 13th in the National League. But in 2013, with the shift, they turned 419, the fourth most in the league. Their pitchers’ earned run average dropped to 3.26 from 3.86.