February 23, 2011

And the Oscar goes to...

...Ryan Kavanaugh? In the spirit of Sunday's Oscars, I wanted to pass along an article I read the other day discussing Ryan Kavanaugh, a movie producer, and his company's use of analytics to manage risk.

When deciding which films to make, Relativity Media executives rely heavily on data. They use what they call a regression analysis—a computer deep-dive into dozens of variables that could affect a film's potential performance, such as genre, release date, and actor's appeal—before deciding to greenlight a film. The goal: limiting the company's risk.

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February 4, 2011

The "Netflix prize" model...only this time more serious

Josh and I have both posted about the Netflix Prize...drawn to both the idea of creating a very accurate preference/choice models with a very large menu of outcomes, as well as the crowd-sourced approach to solving the problem (and there was in fact a winner).

Well I am very excited to share this approach has been applied to a more "serious" problem: build a model that will predict upcoming hospitalizations. The end result is far more lofty than a movie pairing to "Young Frankenstein". This project hopes to identify individuals at greatest risk for imminent adverse events before they happen, creating an "early detection" system to save lives and reduce overall costs.

A $3mil prize is also a great incentive...keep an eye on this content.

Netflix Prize-Style Competition Predicts Hospitalizations
What if you could predict if a given patient were at a higher risk for hospitalization in the coming year? You could potentially save money, and lives, by pulling out all the stops to prevent that hospital visit, if possible. And that's why the Heritage Provider Network (HPN) has put up $3 million for a Netflix Prize-style competition that will pit coders against each other to devise the most effective predictive algorithm for incipient hospitalizations. HPN will be announcing a launch date for the prize this week.

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February 1, 2011

A interwebs dialog!

Mark Egge, a very sharp prospect researcher and data-miner, in addition to being my favorite classical saxophonist, posted a response to my CRISP-DM post. It only took about two years but we have an actual interwebs dialog on data-mining!

I know Josh posted a link to the CoolDataBlog (Kevin MacDonnell has some great ideas and since he is Canadian, all the American readers can say they consult "international sources"). Well Mark is another colleague to pay close attention too.

Maybe this dialog can put the pressure on both of us to add content more frequently 

Check out Mark's blog, Managing Prospect Research