On Tuesday night I presented Getting started with Predictive Analytics in the Public Sector to a public meeting of Analyst First in Canberra.
The presentation itself is an update of one given in June to Canberra’s IBM Business Analytics User Group. For this version I added material describing how analytics supports the risk management cycle, and incorporating some insights from Jim Manzi’s excellent Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society.
Part 1 of the highly recommended Uncontrolled covers the evolution of the scientific method (from Bacon on experimentation, to Hume on induction, to Popper on falsification, to Kuhn on scientific paradigms, through to the present day). Part 2 looks at the development of randomised field trials in the latter half of the twentieth century and their applications in medicine and business (i.e. analytics). Part 3 advocates the more widespread and systematic use of randomised field trials to areas of public policy, learning from the business experiment revolution.
Our thanks to BAE Systems for providing the venue.
