A lesson in prescriptive modeling

For the data professional, the first step to mastering prescriptive modeling is to understand simulation. In this excerpt from the O’Reilly video Hands-On Techniques for Business Model Simulation, I’ll walk you through a practical case study—simulating the cross-breeding of a new species of iris, and new business models for the resulting flowers. Using published open source code, viewers learn to generate a new species of iris, find interesting new characteristics, and search through business model simulations for profitable ways of bringing the new flowers to the market.

It takes a lot of knowledge and skill to create useful simulations of the real world. That information is often hidden by obscure techniques or confusing explanations. In the full O’Reilly Learning Path, Creating Simulations to Discover New Business Models, I take viewers through a straightforward approach to learning prescriptive model simulation by treating it like a foreign language. We start by learning key terms and intuitive definitions. We assemble those terms into meaningful ideas, and we complete the Learning Path with the Iris example shown in the video excerpt in this post.