Tag: regression to the mean

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Latest Read: Keeping Up with the Quants

Have been looking forward to Tom Davenport’s Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics for longer than I care to admit. I throughly enjoyed his book Competing on Analytics all the way back in 2008. His followup Big Data@Work provides the same scope for business regarding the emerging era of Big Data.
Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics Tom has truly mastered the role of business analytics for well over two decades. He is acknowledged as revealing the path of metrics and just as important how success can be defined by adopting a mindset of analytics over intuition. It should be no surprise that I am a big fan of Tom Davenport.

Seems like a lifetime ago in the competitive and fast changing world of analytics. Quantitative analysis with a side of regression is not a diner order but a key skill to identify patterns in data.

An easy read with great common sense approaches for leaders to understand and professionals to embrace it proves not only how business gains insights but how to defend Kobe Bryant.

On the heels of reading Nate Silver’s bestseller The Signal and the Noise, Davenport reveals how quants have not only broken down NBA basketball defensive measures to each quarter when playing Bryant and the Lakers but how to guard him in a last possession game scenario.

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Latest read: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman summarizes research that covers three phases of his career: cognitive biases, prospect theory and happiness. This is certainly a deep dive touching research subjects including regression to the mean. Yes, it is a very rewarding statistical dive. I find this to be one of the more important books that I have read since college.
Thinking, Fast and SlowIn addition, I find this book so applicable to not only professional fields but more importantly to our personal lives.

Very impressed how Kahneman even places the benefits of of this research into PowerPoint presentations. This was a very revealing look at how we present by carefully placing words onto a given slide and how you tell your story.

I also greatly enjoyed his references to several books that I have also read, realizing I am somewhat on track to deeper understanding his teaching how our brains are acting as the book title suggests within our daily lives. This applies at home, at work and at school. We humans are a strange beast. Kahneman is certainly revealing how we are wired to think. More often however, we fail to apply seemingly common logic to easy questions.

This book is certainly filled with examples of how easy we all can misinterpret personal scenarios of logic simply based upon human emotion and conditioning.

While short in review this is simply a book everyone should be reading to gain a fuller understanding of approaching critical thinking.

Talks at Google | Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman