Archive for November 8th, 2012
The Vindication Of Nate Silver
I was all set to write a closer examination of statistician and blogger Nate Silver’s most recent election predictions, a ramp up to during which he was lambasted by a garden variety of mostly conservative voices for either being politically biased, or establishing his predictions on a loose set of statistical shingles.
Only to be informed that one of my esteemed colleagues, David Pittman, had already written such a compendium post. So hey, why reinvent the Big Data prediction wheel?
Here’s a link to David’s fine post, which I encourage you to check out if you want to get a sense of how electoral predictions provide an excellent object lesson for the state of Big Data analysis. (David’s post also includes the on-camera interview that Scott Laningham and I conducted with Nate Silver just prior to his excellent keynote before the gathered IBM Information On Demand 2012 crowd.)
I’m also incorporating a handful of other stories I have run across that I think do a good job of helping people better understand the inflection point for data-driven forecasting that Silver’s recent endeavor represents, along with its broader impact in media and punditry.
They are as follows:
“Nate Silver’s Big Data Lessons for the Enterprise”
“What Nate Silver’s success says about the 4th and 5th estates”
“Election 2012: Has Nate Silver destroyed punditry?”
Nate Silver After the Election: The Verdict
As Forbes reporter wrote in his own post about Silver’s predictions, “the modelers are here to stay.”
Moving forward, I expect we’ll inevitably see an increased capability for organizations everywhere to adopt Silver’s methodical, Bayesian analytical strategies…and well beyond the political realm.