As a heavy industry, railroads seek to appeal to the finance community by focusing on metrics that speak to the company’s efficient utilization of its assets. A key metric is Operating Ratio, which is defined as operating expenses as a…
Data scientists at First Analytics were among many in the profession who were pressed into service to address the pandemic. Our chairman, Tom Davenport, recently published several stories showing how various companies grappled with the radical change in their business…
Perhaps the most common use of machine learning algorithms is to look for anomalies or unexpected events and send an alert to somebody who can act on it. See for example, this use of machine vision, which triggers real-time alerts to an…
Year-over-year comparisons can attribute too much of a volume decline to COVID-19. That is what we showed at the beginning of the pandemic, with predictive analytics applied to railroad car loadings data from the American Association of Railroads (AAR). The…
Goodhart's Law says that, "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." A generalized way of saying it is, "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good…
In early 2020 the Federal Railroad Administration issued a final rule - 49 CFR Part 271 - to help railroads establish a "Risk Reduction Program" to improve the safety of its operations. Part of the rule states, “RRP is a…