Analytics the Right Way

Acknowledgments

Together, we’d like to thank our publishing and editorial team at Wiley—Jim Minatel, Cathleen Small, Pete Gaughan, and Sara Deichman—without whom this book wouldn’t have been possible. Paul Lyren provided both comical wit and a talented hand in illustrating our book, taking our goofy ideas of what passed for “comedy” and making them actually funny; the herculean task of illustrating no fewer than 11 chapters worth of content about analytics—yuck!—is a feat, and we deeply appreciate him doing so. Mike Gustafson and our many colleagues at Search Discovery deserve credit for bringing the two of us together, and for supporting our harebrained ideas, for whatever reason—it was Mike’s light touch that led us to build a friendship and point of view for how the analytics business is and should be.

Tim: I would like to thank everyone from whom I learned something that worked its way into the ideas and examples in this book. But then the editors said that would be several orders of magnitude beyond the appropriate word count, so this list is tragically abbreviated. Matt Gershoff is quoted in the book, and I’ve learned that “minimization of regret” means jumping at every opportunity to have a drink, a meal, or a walk with him—be the topic reinforcement learning, decision-making at the margin, the cost of reducing uncertainty, or the relative merits of European versus American restaurant payment systems, it’s always a delight. Another Matt—Matt Coen—is responsible for giving ...