last modified: 2023-05-15
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Not a closed list, not a recipe! Rather, these are essential building blocks for a strategy of value creation based on data. |
1. Predict
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a. Examples of companies
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Predicting crime
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Predicting deals
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Predictive maintenance
b. Obstacles and difficulties
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Risk missing the long tail, algorithmic discrimination, stereotyping
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Neglect of novelty
2. Suggest
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a. Examples of companies
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Amazon’s product recommendation system
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Google’s “Related searches…”
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Retailer’s personalized recommendations
b. Obstacles and difficulties
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The cold start problem, managing serendipity and filter bubble effects.
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Finding the value proposition which goes beyond the simple “you purchased this, you’ll like that”
3. Curate
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a. Examples of companies
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Clarivate Analytics curating metadata(data, data curation) from scientific publishing
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Nielsen and IRI curating and selling retail data
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ImDB curating and selling movie data
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NomadList providing practical info on global cities for nomad workers
b. Obstacles and difficulties
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Slow progress: curation needs human labor to insure high accuracy, it does not scale the way a computerized process would.
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Must maintain continuity: missing a single year or month hurts the value of the overall dataset.
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Scaling up / right incentives for the workforce: the workforce doing the digital labor of curation should be paid fairly, which is not the case yet.
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Quality control
4. Enrich
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Examples of companies
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Selling methods and tools to enrich datasets
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Selling aggregated indicators
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Selling credit scores
Obstacles and difficulties
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Knowing which cocktail of data is valued by the market
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Limit duplicability
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Establish legitimacy
5. Rank / match / compare
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Examples of companies
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Search engines ranking results
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Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc… which rank places
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Any system that needs to filter out best quality entities among a crowd of candidates
Obstacles and difficulties
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Finding emergent, implicit attributes (imagine: if you rank things based on just one public feature: not interesting nor valuable)
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Insuring consistency of the ranking (many rankings are less straightforward than they appear)
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Avoid gaming of the system by the users (for instance, companies try to play Google’s ranking of search results at their advantage)
6. Segment / classify
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Examples of companies
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Tools for discovery / exploratory analysis by segmentation
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Diagnostic tools (spam or not? buy, hold or sell? healthy or not?)
Obstacles and difficulties
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Evaluating the quality of the comparison
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Dealing with boundary cases
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Choosing between a pre-determined number of segments (like in the k-means) or letting the number of segments emerge
7. Generate / synthesize
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Examples of companies
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OpenAI with ChatGPT
Obstacles and difficulties
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Legal framework still being shaped (what about the copyright of the content ChatxGPT has been trained on?)
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Still new, no "textbook" on how to use it at its fullest potential
Combos
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The end
Find references for this lesson, and other lessons, here.
This course is made by Clement Levallois.
Discover my other courses in data / tech for business: https://www.clementlevallois.net
Or get in touch via Twitter: @seinecle