Originally published in The San Francisco Chronicle (the cover article of Sunday’s “Insight” section) What if the data tells you to be racist? Without the right precautions, machine learning — the technology that drives risk-assessment in law enforcement, as well as hiring and loan decisions — explicitly penalizes underprivileged groups. Left to its own devices, […]

 Here are two recent entries on the big but neglected issue of data reliability and analytic validity (DR&AV), from the vast commentariat that is LinkedIn: One of my complaints with hashtag#bigdata, is there isn’t enough focus on getting the right kind of data. We deal with this in healthcare all the time. Much of our […]

 The model looks good. It’s parsimonious, provides effective segmentation, and the predictors appear to be intuitively reasonable. While there is no problem with deploying results, you need to be able to order the variables in terms of their importance, a seemingly straightforward task. However, this is not as easy to do, as it appears. It’s […]

 For today’s leading deep learning methods and technology, attend the conference and training workshops at Predictive Analytics World for Government, Sept 17-21, 2018 in Washington, DC. Data-driven decisions for law enforcement are not new and have been used for over 20 years. New York City is often considered a pioneer in embracing methodologies and technologies to […]

 APQC Chair Carla O’Dell interviews Predictive Analytics Times Executive Editor and Predictive Analytics World Founder Eric Siegel about predictive analytics and machine learning’s application to process management. Dr. Siegel will be speaking at APQC’s Process & Performance Management Conference this October. Note: This is a transcript of an audio interview. Carla O’Dell: Welcome Eric! Let’s […]

 There is not much attention paid these days to data reliability and validity (DR&V). Many data-scientific practitioners, especially those in Computer Science-IT Data Science (CS-IT Data Science),  don’t get what the terms mean, especially for DR&AV work they might need to do routinely that they do not do at all. After all, we’ve got Big […]

  As both a speaker and a representative of the IIA, I attended the Predictive Analytics World (PAW) show in Las Vegas, June 5-6, 2018. The organizers stated that they had approximately 600 people registered – and the opening session didn’t appear far off from that. This year the show had a new format called […]