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Fall Line Analytics Newsletter (April 2008)
Common Sense in Data Analysis
There is more to data analysis than this...
Complex data analysis, like in political campaigns or web advertising studies, sometimes requires burying our heads in numbers for hours on end. After running all the calculations, there’s an answer staring at us on the screen. We now know who’s going to vote for the candidate, or buy the product.
Or do we? One thing Fall Line principal David Latterman use to ask his undergraduate students is, “But does it look right?” Removing the analyst’s hat, does the number staring at us just seem correct? Does it make sense? If we did the work right, an unexpected answer is usually exactly that, but sometimes it can mean that we asked the wrong questions, or lost the forest for the trees.
For instance, if a survey reveals that the mean age for purchasers of a hip new phone is 78, the wrong people may have been sampled for that survey. Or, if we see that the most hits for an online hip-hop radio station came from rural Utah, we may have to re-examine the geographic coding on the original website data. All of the solutions we derive may certainly be correct, but at the end of an analysis, we have to look at the results and ask, does it feel right? If not, triple-check all the data, all the assumptions, and all the calculations.
Fall Line Analytics brings common sense to the table with its considerable quantitative skill set. If you’re going to trust a market research firm with answering your most important business or campaign questions, make sure they have a great deal of experience in many kinds of professional settings and true understanding of how the real world works. It’s always possible to simply push buttons on a computer, but it’s crucial to understand where data analysis fits into the larger scheme of things.
Cool Map of the Month - San Francisco Crime Map - 2002-2007
Fall Line just finished a major project helping to analyze San Francisco crime patterns... more
Cool Map of the Month #2! - California Turonout Map - November 2004
To get a sense of what we're in for this fall, we look at California turnout in a Presidential year... more
Good links to know
- •Edward Tufte's Homepage - One of the world's best in data visualization, contains everything from the art of data to some really useful bulletin boards.
- •Curbed SF - Good real estate and local character blog in San Francisco. Ironic, but not over-the-top.
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