I was honored to have my book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie or Die, covered in this article in GARP.org. Here is an excerpt from the article.
Predictive Analytics' New Wave
By Katherine Heires, Risk News (published by the Global Association of Risk Professionals)
Fascination with the future is part of human nature. In a commercial or financial context, accurate predictions have major business implications; in finance, many quantitative processes and innovations are designed to deliver such insights for competitive advantage.
One doesn't need a crystal ball — or sophisticated software, for that matter — to measure the demand for the latest in predictive-analytics tools or to understand how and why it is accelerating. Predictive analytics can be seen everywhere from the micro level, as in credit scoring on loan applications, a technique banks have been employing since the 1940s; to the macro analyses that regulatory bodies are developing to assess systemic risks. Financial and nonfinancial enterprises alike aspire to mine Big Data for patterns and insights that can foretell, and create opportunities out of, market trends or customer behaviors, while also taking emerging risks into account.
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An ever-widening array of entities — in advertising, health care, insurance, energy, and even government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission — have embraced predictive analytics in some form…
A former Columbia University professor of computer science, Eric Siegel is a consultant and author of Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie or Die, one of a number of titles indicating a growing level of popular and business interest in the field. Founder of the Predictive Analytics World conferences, he notes that in 2009 he hosted two conferences, and 10 are on the calendar for 2014. "The two new predictive analytics verticals we will focus on this year will be manufacturing and health care," he says.
Click here for the complete article (PDF, reproduced with permission).