Beware of Creative Analytics: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

How often have we seen a graph in an opinion piece without knowing how it was created, but somewhere in the back of our mind we suspected that it was tweaked somehow to make a point? How can we ferret out “creative analytics” from the true story? Remember Mark Twain’s famous quote about […]

Tableau Public: Interactive Obesity Data On The Web

The viz below uses Tableau Public and allows visitors to explore differences in food consumption and food/soda taxes based on obesity rates in the US.  Notice the dramatic differences in soft drink consumption among populations with different obesity rates.  At first glance, it appears that cutting back on sodas is our best bet for reducing […]

How to Avoid Misleading Conclusions: Explore Your Data

Often we have to work with data without knowing all the details of how it was collected and processed.  In those situations we first need to determine what information the data contains and what it can and cannot tell us.   We need to ask questions of the data and determine whether it makes sense, […]

Decision Making During Turmoil: How Well Are We Prepared?

In order to make profitable decisions, we need good information.  Whether we base our decisions on sales, customer perceptions or the number of widgets we shipped last month, our information comes from some system that collects and measures relevant data for us.

In my Six Sigma Black Belt class we recently discussed the challenges of developing […]