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HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers (HBR Guide Series)
book

HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers (HBR Guide Series)

by Harvard Business Review
March 2018
Beginner content levelBeginner
256 pages
3h 56m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers (HBR Guide Series)

CHAPTER 11

When to Act On a Correlation, and When Not To

by David Ritter

“Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’”

—Chris Anderson,Wired, June 23, 2008

The sentiment expressed by Chris Anderson in 2008 is a popular meme in the big data community. “Causality is dead,” say the priests of analytics and machine learning. They argue that given enough statistical evidence, it’s no longer necessary to understand why things happen—we need only know what things happen together.

But inquiring whether correlation is enough is asking the wrong question. For consumers of big data, the key question is, “Can I take action on the basis of a correlation finding?” The answer to that question is, “It depends”—primarily on two factors:

  • Confidence that ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781633694293