Predictive Analytics For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19

Ten Steps to Build a Predictive Analytic Model

IN THIS CHAPTER

Building a predictive analytics team

Setting the business objectives

Preparing your data

Sampling your data

Avoiding “garbage in, garbage out”

Creating quick victories

Fostering change in your organization

Building deployable models

Evaluating your model

Updating your model

This chapter discusses best practices in building predictive analytics models. You'll get a handle on the importance of defining the business objectives early on — and on getting the leaders of your business to champion your project.

Building a Predictive Analytics Team

To assemble your predictive analytics team, you'll need to recruit business analysts, data scientists, and information technologists. Regardless of their particular areas of expertise, your team members should be curious, engaged, motivated, and excited to dig as deep as necessary to make the project — and the business — succeed.

Getting business expertise on board

Business analysts serve as your domain experts (see Chapter 15): They provide the business-based perspective on which problems to solve — and give valuable insight on all business-related questions. Their experience and domain knowledge give them an intuitive savvy about what approaches might or might not work, on where to start and what to look at to get something going.

A model is only as relevant as the ...