Data Geniuses Who Predict the Past

Data Geniuses Who Predict the Past

If there is one thing I hope you remember from your college statistics class, it’s this: Correlation does not imply causation. This is especially important to remember in our world of big data. Any large dataset will have hundreds of thousands of correlations, but most of those correlations will reflect purely random occurrences that mean…

The Best Place to Learn All Things Data

The Best Place to Learn All Things Data

Every year I peruse the listings of summer college training courses on research methods. Part of it is nostalgia—I loved school. But I’m also looking for courses that will keep me and our Versta employees at the forefront of new knowledge and research techniques. (I didn’t learn R in graduate school, so yes, I took…

Execs Vote on Top Research Needs in Marketing

Execs Vote on Top Research Needs in Marketing

Every two years marketing executives from more than 60 corporate members of the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) vote on the most important marketing topics they need to understand better.  They represent companies like Kraft, Colgate-Palmolive, Bank of America, Nielsen, and Walmart.  MSI—a think tank, of sorts, whose mission is to “bridge the academic and business…

Versta Research Post

Big Question for Big Data: Does It Work?

The New York Times Magazine ran a feature article in June implying that big data and quantitative algorithms are the secret of how Obama won the election.  The young, technologically-savvy “Obama-wonks” who toiled in “the cave” writing thousands of lines of computer code, took advantage of huge repositories of data from the likes of Facebook…