We are pleased to announce that First Analytics will be participating in the Foresight Practitioner’s Conference 2025, hosted by the Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. This year’s event will take place on March 3-4, 2025, at the University…
With three-quarters of 2024 behind us, we thought it would be fun to look at predictions about AI for the year. In particular, those made in an early January article by First Analytics Chairman Tom Davenport and Randy Bean. You…
In prior posts, we have attached various laws, paradoxes, and fallacies to work in data science and machine learning. See for example, Simpson's Paradox, The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, Goodhart's Law, and Benford's Law. In this post we consider the True…
Five years ago we sarcastically put forth a data science "buzzword bingo" card for people to print to take to vendor pitches and senior management meetings. It is still available here. We thought it would be a good time to…
We have previously discussed interesting phenomenon in analytics which, if not carefully considered or understood, can lead to unexpected or incorrect conclusions. See, for example, Simpson's Paradox and Goodhart's law. And then there is "data-dredging" of which so-called P-hacking is…
Following up with our infocomic on our work in the rail industry, here is another fun little illustration depicting some of the work we at First Analytics have done. This one focuses on consumer products (including CPG) and retail. These…
Here is a fun little illustration depicting some of the work we at First Analytics have done in the rail industry. It's patterned after Richard Scarry's classic children's illustrated book, "What do People Do All Day?" Several of these stories…
In a prior blog post we showed Benford's Law in action at Lowe's. There we indicated that a popular use of Benford's Law is to flag potentially suspect expense reports for a closer look. So we decided to try it…
File this under the "Fun" category (or perhaps "sarcasm"). If you are not familiar with the Buzzword Bingo game, you can read about it here. The next time you sit through a vendor's pitch, or a speech from senior management, print…
'Tis the season of the mileage run. Some frequent fliers find themselves just short of qualifying for a particular elite status tier in an airline loyalty program for next year. In order to secure status, some will book cost-effective flights…