Glossary

Data that come in the form of numerical values can vary enormously in range. If we operated a second hand auto business we might record the mileage of a vehicle and the number of services it has had. The recorded mileage might range from 2,000 to 300,000 miles, whereas the…

Recommender systems have been made famous by Amazon – “Customers who bought this also bought that …”. Organizations in retail and related businesses who are not using a recommender system are behind the curve. The fact that fifty or so recommender systems are available shows how widespread is their use.…

Sensitivity and Specificity Imagine your business is about to launch a new product. In anticipation of this, the marketing department works with a team of business analysts to identify which customers might be good candidates for a promotion. A model is built, and it identifies relevant prospects based on various…

It sounds fairly impressive, but is actually quite simple. The quadratic loss function gives a measure of how accurate a predictive model is. It works by taking the difference between the predicted probability and the actual value – so it is used on classification schemes which produce probabilities (Naive Bayes…