Talk about Data

6

Chapter

Detecting data distortions: Analytics biases that everyone should know

What you’ll learn

In this chapter we discuss frequently made mistakes in the analytics process. These so-called biases affect the quality of analytics-based decision making negatively and should thus be recognised and avoided.

Like most of you, we trust our intuition in areas where we have lots of experience, but we rather rely on data where we don’t. In the latter case, we feel more secure and confident when we have relevant data. However, caution is warranted as the mere availability of data may give us a false sense of security.

So, whenever there is relevant data, we feel that our decision making must improve.

But that ain’t necessarily so.

Sometimes data ...