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DePaul University To Offer Degree In Predictive Analysis
itwbennett writes "The Chicago-based DePaul University will offer what it says is the nation's first master's degree in predictive analysis, the school announced on Wednesday in conjunction with IBM, which will provide resources for the program. 'We realized there was a need to create a program that prepared students in careers in data analytics and business intelligence,' said Raffaella Settimi, an associate professor at DePaul's College of Computing and Digital Media, who helped craft the program. 'A lot of the professionals who work in these fields have a variety of backgrounds, but there really isn't a program dedicated to data analytics,' Settimi said."
Did they predict their own success?
Chiromancy ...
Astrology
i-ching
tarot cards
numerology
dream interpretation
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I hope they are prepared for people to make fun of them. I predict that, too.
statistics.
Yours In Chicago,
Kilgore Trout
and I predict this will be FIRST POST!!!!
(yes, I did get a D- average... how did you know?)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I got a notice saying the courses had been canceled due to unforeseen circumstances...
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
There are, however, many quality degree programs in Statistics. As someone who went through one of them, you can largely choose your own mix of theory and practice. I wonder if this isn't just statistics rebranded? I hope it doesn't concentrate too much on certain proprietary software packages. Statistics is like anything else. You can easily produce a bunch of numbers and compile massive books of tables and graphics. But if you don't know the assumptions of each of your methods, and consequently their shortcomings in each situation, you can draw some fairly bad conclusions rather quickly. I just hope this program gives a solid background in theoretical statistical inference, experimental design, and regression analysis, so students understand the 'why'.
A.K.A. Applied Statistics
'We realized there was a need to create a program that prepared students in careers in data analytics and business intelligence,' said Raffaella Settimi, an associate professor at DePaul's College of Computing and Digital Media, who helped craft the program.
It has got to be right up there with military intelligence and giant ants.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
Will it be taught by Nostredumbass?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I have an M.S. in predictive analytics, and I'm only months away from my Ph.D. These guys didn't do much research.
is anything to do with discovering your predictive algorithm fails.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Now who will offer the first course branching off from this named Psycho History?
This could be very popular with Italian Geologists.
that's what happens EVERY time the s (spiritual) factor is left out of the equation, missing 99% of the possible variables.
Unfortunately the idiotic moderators are uninformed.
K. Trout
Most financial companies of any size are doing this already with Ph.Ds and Masters from economic programs. I don't see how is this any difference from modern economics. It sounds sexier? IBM is doing it? They might as well call it Psychohistory and suck their own cocks while they are at it.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The quality of their product is well known in Chicago.
What school are you attending? I googled the terms and didn't come up with much?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Math will prove that civilization is coming to a new dark age. We must compile encyclopedia galactica to reduce this period of ignorance so that Foundation may return.
So this will pump out the cubicle critters to run systems like
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/EU_social_network_spy_system_brief,_INDECT_Work_Package_4,_2009 and
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Mind_Your_Tweets:_The_CIA_Social_Networking_Surveillance_System
The only question is why do they need to make such bold public push for future workers? Hard to tap the shoulder of an entire graduating class for a private chat?
Fusion centres a growth sector in the USA?
NSA shifts to e-mail, Web, data-mining dragnet
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9890761-38.html
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Psychohistory anyone?
I looked at the site and it's basically a math degree which requires calculus and some statistics. I don't think this degree in specific would be worth the money unless you really have a passion for math.
I think that this is best guide to how the market analysts actually predicted anything on Wall Street
The code of the schoolyard, Marge! The rules that teach a boy to be a man. Let's see. Don't tattle. Always make fun of those different from you. Never say anything, unless you're sure everyone feels exactly the same way you do.
Tune in the Marketwatch a few times and see if I am wrong...
I know some scientists who could use a course in predictive analysis
Programs like this essentially boil down to training to interpret (using this word generously here) statistical results, without a solid understanding of statistics.
Anyone smart enough to be entrustable with this kind of stuff, should be smart and willing enough to learn real statistics. Unfortunately this would require more commitment than our "fluid" and deskilled labor market can tolerate. We all pay for this.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Get your Astrology and Fortune telling jokes out of the way, but it's not really hard to use predictive analysis and come out to be very accurate (within 3%). You are not always going to hit it on the head, but it's very easy to get close. There are patterns in everything people do and while there will always be outliers for the most part behavior follows basic patterns or cycles, although these may change over time.
It's important to be predictive in anything that involves a queuing system, such as a sales website or where a lot of the theory got its start in telephone calls. Really it applies to anything where people try to do the same thing at once that requires resources for the company to allocate. It can be the difference between success (Blizzcon ticket queue never crashed out) and failure (iPhone 4G). Especially with more people trying to access the same thing at once on the internet, this sort of analysis of how many resources to allocate efficiently is going to be more important. You don't want to allocate too much due to costs, but you can't do too little otherwise your customers suffer.
Yeah, it’s a lot like statistics, but it's going from 'What Happened?' to 'How and why did it happen?' and from 'What is happening now?' to 'What's the next best action?'.
I went to DePaul and got an MS in Applied Statistics. I also work for a marketing company doing "predictive analytics". (I really don't like that term. It degrades the importance of understanding the relationship between independent and dependent variables, and places more emphasis on dependent variable fit. You can have a highly accurate model, but if marketers don't understand how their efforts affect sales the model is worthless.)
At DePaul one series of classes was mostly math theory, the remaining classes were 100% about "predictive analytics", i.e. using a computer to build statistical models. It used a more traditional approach to applied statistics with "topical" classes: sampling, forecasting, design & analysis of experiments, nonparametric statistics, Monte Carlo simulation, multivariate statistics, etc.
The statistics program is part of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences in the math department. This new program is in the computer science department (which has its own college). The program (http://www.cdm.depaul.edu/academics/Pages/MSinPredictiveAnalytics.aspx) looks like a hybrid of CS, Stats & Marketing. It includes a class in neural networks which most stats programs lack, but again, this focuses on "prediction" instead of "inference", which is less useful to marketers. (Neural networks is a highly valuable topic. Just not as much in this field.) Also, the program lacks pure programming classes, which there is A LOT of in this field (data never comes in formats ready to model). Most is done in SAS or R, but any programming language teaching basic concepts (variables, logic, arrays, loops, functions) is useful.
I already have qualifications in the field of dead reckoning.
I reckon that if I took this course, I would get an A.
Perhaps this will lead to Hari Seldon's psychohistory.
They're several years too late. The market for Wall Street "quants" has collapsed.
Being from their cross-town rival I almost hate to say this, but DePaul has been at the forefront of this sort of program for some time. Back in the late '80's or early '90's they introduced a master's degree in applied mathematics that contained an in-depth study of all of the material customarily found in a quantitatively-oriented MBA degree, with some additional courses that were somewhat more oriented toward the theory behind that basic core.
I wonder what Nassim Taleb would say about this degree?
He would probably point out that it amounts to an advanced degree in practical fraud perpetuation.
Standard Gaussian statistics cannot accurately predict anything that matters.
Are the guys teaching this stuff the same ones that failed to predict the financial bubble?
Seastead this.
They prosecute you there if your predictions are wrong.
Afaik, DePaul University is a Catholic pseudo-degree mill. So they'll use just use papal infallibility.
As others have observed, they have basically just added some calculous courses onto a standard low-level liberal arts degree. You'll fair far better hiring any math major with half was decent grades from any upper level state school.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell