Don’t act so surprised, Your Highness. You weren’t on any mercy mission this time. Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by Rebel spies. I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you. In my experience, there is no such thing as luck. Partially, but it also …

The buzz around using predictive tools to analyze big data in discrete areas of a business is loud and deserved. In health care, these tools are changing the way doctors identify people at risk of developing certain diseases; in fashion, they crunch purchasing data to anticipate trends; sales and marketing …

An Accenture survey conducted last year found that only one in five companies said that they were “very satisfied” with the returns they’ve received from analytics to date. One of the reasons analytics is working for the companies in this select group is because they tend to deploy analytics technologies …

For a retailer, it’s extremely useful to know whether a customer will be back or has abandoned you for good. Starting in the late 1980s, academic researchers began to develop sophisticated predictive techniques to answer that question. The best-known is the Pareto/NBD (for negative binomial distribution) model, which takes a …

New developments in data science offer a tremendous opportunity to improve decision-making. Machine learning, pattern recognition, and other predictive analytics tools can constitute a source of competitive advantage for those companies that adopt them early on; but like any new capability, there is an enormous gulf between awareness, intent and …

For generations, pollsters have used probability polling (think of the Gallup polls quoted on the nightly news) as their go-to method to forecast the outcomes of elections. But cost increases and concerns about accuracy have called the method into question. A new form of polling called non-probability sampling — opt-in …