Data Mining and Predictive Analysis

1

Basics

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)

1.1 Basic Statistics

Some of my earliest work using data mining and predictive analytics on crime and criminals employed the use of relatively advanced statistical techniques that yielded very complex models. While the results were analytically sound, and even of interest to a very small group of similarly inclined criminal justice and forensic scientists, the outcomes were so complicated and arcane that they had very little utility to those who needed them most, particularly those on the job in the public safety arena. Ultimately, these results really contributed nothing in a larger sense because they could not be translated into the ...