The experienced digital analytics consulting team at InfoTrust is proud to announce that Data Science Team Lead Pam Castricone was recently published in Analytics Interpreted: A Compilation of Perspectives.
Published by Women in Analytics and written by experts in the field, the book is a compilation of essays on thought leadership, experience-based perspectives, and frameworks across the spectrum of the most relevant and pressing topics in analytics.
Castricone’s contributed essay, “Using Analytics to Play in Everyone’s Backyard,” was inspired by a recent client project.
“The client had a vast array of datasets that we could utilize for modeling but we learned that the behavior we were trying to predict was complicated and deeply personal,” she says. “We identified 13 different factors that impact the behavior and only five could be inferred from the data. When entering a new domain, it’s tempting to let the data and algorithms lead the way but that was not effective for this project; we learned that we needed to gain a deep understanding of the domain and the causal factors that impact the customer behavior.”
Women in Analytics’ mission is to provide visibility to the women making an impact in the analytics space and a platform for them to lead the conversations around the advancements of analytical research, development, and application. Proceeds from the book will go to the Women in Analytics Foundation, which funds educational initiatives and provides free resources to the community.
Essay Abstract
“Using Analytics to Play in Everyone’s Backyard” is about humility, as well as the importance of domain knowledge alongside technical expertise when tackling a predictive modeling project. Analytics teams are often very focused on collecting data and ensuring its accuracy; there’s often far less emphasis on questioning the relevance of the data that’s being proposed to solve an actual business problem. With the emergence of sophisticated tools and high-level programming languages, it may seem that analysts’ jobs are easier than ever, but those are no replacement for a fundamental understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.
To access Castricone’s essay in Analytics Interpreted: A Compilation of Perspectives, purchase it here.
About Pam Castricone
Castricone is an experienced analytics professional, specializing in leading projects for large, multi-brand e-commerce websites and developing custom analytics architectures. She is an adjunct instructor at the University of Cincinnati and a co-author of Crawl, Walk, Run by InfoTrust co-founders Alexander Yastrebenetsky and Michael Loban.
