Super Crunchers summary

Most people feel that statistics are rather dry, but what if statistics could help you find true love or detect fraud? Regression, a powerful super crunching technique, can do both of these things.

Regression is about assessing historical data to determine how different factors influence a certain variable of interest. It worked in the wine and baseball examples. Let’s look in more detail at two further ways it can be applied.

Super crunching isn’t just about analyzing the future and past – it’s also changing the medical and business worlds. Randomized testing, a powerful super crunching technique, is already reshaping medical and business research.

Randomized trials are crucial for determining whether or not a medical treatment is effective. Let’s say you wanted to find out whether chemotherapy is more effective than radiation in treating cancer. You’d probably have to control for a number of factors, like the patient’s diet, age or lifestyle habits. Otherwise those small variables could impact the outcome of your research, like if, for example, more people in the chemotherapy treatment group smoked than their counterparts in the radiation group.

Want to influence society? Run a randomized experiment! Randomized testing is changing more than our medicine and businesses – it’s changing our public policy too.

Politicians can use data generated through randomized trials to decide what policies to enact. In fact, policy experiments are already underway in a number of countries.

We’ve seen some examples of how super crunching is already reshaping our world, but what role do humans play in all this? Can mathematical equations really tell us more than traditional experts, with their years of experience and human intuition?

The answer is yes. Super crunching outperforms traditional expertise in almost every case.

Lots of experts who base their decisions on personal experience and intuition feel threatened by the rise of super crunching. After all, it seems to undermine their work.

Super crunching actually threatens a whole range of professionals. Loan officers, for example, are completely irrelevant now.