Jun
2014

Data Intelligence for the Charity Sector

With the majority of large commercial organisations embracing Big Data as a means to refine their products and better understand their customers, the charitable sector has been slow to adopt the same techniques to streamline their operations and increase their donation rates.

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Jan
2014

Hidden Data and Surviving a Sinking Ship: Simpson’s Paradox

When dealing with data it generally pays to be curious, rather than take them at face value. Blindly analysing the data without properly understanding their provenance and context can lead to surprisingly misleading results, especially if there are influential factors that you either ignore or fail to record.

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Apr
2013

Breaking News: 1 in 20 Statistical Tests Are Wrong!

This lighthearted cartoon from XKCD makes an important point about classical hypothesis testing: if you test enough things you’re bound to find something that’s significant. To avoid this and many other pitfalls of a naive application of statistical methods, it is important to seek statistical advice.

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