Predictive Analytics Superstar Nate Silver Celebrates Flawless Track Record
“President Obama may have been the big winner this week, but coming in a close second: New York Times blogger, statistician and self-described geek, Nate Silver,” says Andrea Channing when introducing the predictive-analytics superstar on the Today Show Nov. 9. We salute data scientist and author Nate Silver for his flawless prediction of this year’s U.S. presidential election results on his New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight!
Chris Taylor summarized in his fantastic Mashable article: “What does this victory mean? That mathematical models can no longer be derided by ‘gut-feeling’ pundits. That Silver’s contention – TV pundits are generally no more accurate than a coin toss – must now be given wider credence.”
What does this mean for marketers? Anametrix was founded by marketers on the principle that data-driven business decisions produce a better return on marketing investment (ROMI) than decisions based on gut feelings. Until now, there was no easy way to connect in real time and analyze all the data sources marketers needed to derive these statistically sound insights. Our predictive-analytics capabilities enable marketers to become the Nate Silvers of their companies. Anametrix can do for marketers what Taylor says Silver does with his predictive modeling: “takes all that myopic human bias out of the equation” and reduces the “ever-present temptation to cherry pick” data sources.
Revolution Analytics’ VP of Marketing David Smith, an R evangelist, data scientist and statistician, offered on his blog (and reprinted in VentureBeat) one of the best explanations that we’ve seen for Silver’s success factors (truncated).
“I’ve been following Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog since before the 2008 election (well before it was acquired by the New York Times), and I’ve always admired his methods from a statistical point of view. His forecasts are much more than simple poll-averaging, and the reasons for his success are manifold:
- Use of many sources of data.
![]()
- Using the past to guide the future.
- Extracting information from every source.
- Understanding correlations.
- Use of statistical models. … This is one of the areas where Silver impresses: he used the right regression models with appropriate distributional assumption to convert all that historical and contemporary data into race-by-race forecasts. You can’t do this stuff in Excel, you need sophisticated statistical modeling software and expertise.
- Monte-Carlo simulations for the Electoral College. …Every day, he ran thousands of mock elections, flipping a virtual coin (weighted according to the state-level models) for each of the 50 states, and counted the electoral votes. …
- Understanding of the limitations of polls.
- A consistency in methodology.
- A focus on probabilities, not predictions.
- Great communication skills.”
Nate Silver is among the first celebrities in one of the hottest current professions – data scientist. In October Harvard Business Review contributors Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil declared the data scientist “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.” ComputerWorld’s Patrick Thibodeau cited a 2011 McKinsey Co. report warning of a “mega shortage in analytical talent of as many as 190,000 people by 2018” and highlighted seven universities that now offer Master of Science in Business Analytics. These data scientists are in high demand in business and politics. According to Michael Scherer’s Time Magazine Swamplandia blog, the Obama’s Campaign Manager Jim Messina “hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official ‘chief scientist’ for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.” It’s no surprise to us that Ghani came from an intensive B2C marketing company, and Anametrix is among several companies actively hiring talented data scientists like him.
As Google’s analytics guru Avinash Kaushik blogged Nov. 6, “Sometimes there is such a thing as too much data, too many pundits,” speculating that the election would not be as close as pundits and polls suggested. If you, too, are tired of drowning in disparate data and making marketing decisions on gut feelings, come see how Anametrix can help.
Please share your comments on the sudden rise to fame of Nate Silver and the profession of data scientist. How are you integrating data science and predictive analytics in your campaigns? What are your plans for hiring and cultivating data scientist talent at your organization? What amazing results have you been able to achieve by analyzing marketing data and leveraging predictive analytics?