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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
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'.
statistics.
As Feynman might have said, Statistics is to Predictive Analytics as Mathematics is to Physics.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
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.
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'm afraid you will have to wait about 20000 more years for that...
If you have not already been contacted to take part, it is because it had been mathematically determined that you would provide no useful input.
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.
Are the guys teaching this stuff the same ones that failed to predict the financial bubble?
Seastead this.