Articles and News

“It is sometimes very difficult to decide whether trend is best modeled as deterministic or stochastic, and the decision is an important part of the science – and art – of building forecasting models.” ― Diebold,  Elements of Forecasting, 1998 A time series can have a very strong trend. Visually, we often can see it. Gross…

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.” ― W. Edwards Deming, statistician So, you have estimated a bunch of forecasting models and realize (kudos to you!) that they are “all wrong” (ala George Box). But your forecasting deadline is looming, and you need to find some useful models on which to base a…

“The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.” ― Milton Friedman, economist Holdout samples are a mainstay of predictive analytics. Set aside a portion of your data (say, 30%). Build your candidate models. Then “internally validate” your models using the holdout sample. More sophisticated methods like cross…

“Big data is not about the data.*” ― Gary King, Harvard University (*It’s about the analytics.) Machine Learning. Deep Learning. Data Science. Artificial Intelligence. Big Data. Not a day goes by that one or all of these buzzwords stream past in our business news feeds. Data analytics has become mainstream. And you better jump on…

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” ― attributed to statistician George Box This quote pretty well sums up time series forecasting models. Any given model is unlikely to be spot on. And some can be wildly off. But through a careful methodical process, we can whittle the pool of candidate models down to…

“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” ― John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform Forecasting the future is an exercise in uncertainty. And the further out one looks, the more uncertain the forecast becomes. Most businesses are keenly focused on the next…

“The only thing I cannot predict is the future.” ― Amit Trivedi, Riding The Roller Coaster: Lessons from financial market cycles we repeatedly forget It goes without saying that every business is keenly interested in knowing what the future will bring. Will sales grow next year? By how much? Will suppliers increase their prices? How…

We were looking for data nuggets in the TUDLA Latin America B2B database the other day and stumbled on something that, to hardcore Tableau users like us, was quite surprising. Turns out that in the LATAM region, Tableau is not the preferred data visualization platform. In fact, it is not even in the top five.…

Shelby Cullom Davis, “one of the least talked about, but most successful investors,” managed to parlay a 1947 $50,000 investment into over $800 million by the time of his passing in 1994. A 23% compounded average annual rate of return.  Not too bad. During his career Shelby advised Thomas Dewey on economic matters when he…

In “places like … Raleigh, you see a real concentration of brain power. You have a lot of smart people living in the same place. That will drive the economy”, Steven P. Rosenthal, Northland Investment Corp. And so will tax incentives. The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill combined statistical area (CSA), with over 2 million people, is the second…