Predictive Modeling Quotes

You have to imagine a world in which there's this abundance of data, with all of these connected devices generating tons and tons of data. And you're able to reason over the data with new computer science and make your product and service better. What does your business look like then? That's the question every CEO should be asking.

A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have something equivalent in an additional decade.

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.

I came in as an engineer and worked on artificial intelligence at Google. I worked on related sites and matching advertising to queries with some of our earliest ads.

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

My favorite Asimov works were the 'Foundation' books because the concept, at the time, was crazy, but psycho-history has now turned out to be an actual real thing. You can predict the actions of large groups of people once you understand, for lack of a better way to put it, their way of existing and their prejudices.

Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.

Those market researchers... are playing games with you and me and with this entire country. Their so-called samples of opinion are no more accurate or reliable than my grandmother's big toe was when it came to predicting the weather.

The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much.

I've become increasingly fascinated with social media to improve on traditional ways of preparing for and predicting the future.

I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest.

Science is prediction, not explanation.

Every day we go over data and use science and data to drive policy and decision-making.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive.

There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.

Across our great nation, we've begun to see an acceleration of the power of data to deliver value.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

We need to have an understanding of what causes what to happen in the world, and why.

I learned analytics. It's a point of reference, of information. It has to be a factor in decision making.

Some things, like the orbits of the planets, can be calculated far into the future. But that's atypical. In most contexts, there is a limit. Even the most fine-grained computation can only forecast British weather a few days ahead. There are limits to what can ever be learned about the future, however powerful computers become.

We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.