Data crunching
HumansPosted by David Sumpter Mon, March 01, 2010 10:11:53This week's Economist has an interesting series of articles on the data explosion we have experienced the last few years. Quite alot of this explosion is related to human collective behaviour. As Mehdi pointed out in an earlier post, Google is leading the way here. But there are lots of other sources it seems that big businesses are very interesting in spotting patterns in collective behaviour.
Its funny reading an article like this because first I got the impression that there was lots we can learn from these companies. But later on I came to the conclusions that they just get massive datasets load them in to R and look for correlations between things. Some of the correlations they were apparently surprised by were pretty obvious really, e.g. people mass buy easy to cook food before a hurricane is going to strike. I'm not sure I can do better than this, but it seems the idea of dynamically modelling lies a long way off.
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