Worst Practices in Data Mining

No software, no matter how powerful, and no analyst, no matter how talented, can guarantee perfect (or even highly accurate) forecasts. Forecast accuracy is ultimately limited by the nature of the behavior being forecast

July 27, 2010 by Sandro Saitta

I recently read the article Worst practices in business forecasting written by Michael Gilliland and Udo Sglavo. It is published in the July/August issue of Analytics Magazine , which is by the way an excellent journal about analytics. In their article, the authors are looking for the reasons why forecasts are sometimes completely wrong. According to them, there are four main reasons:

Unsound software
Untrained, unskilled, inexperienced or unmotivated forecasters
Political contamination
Unforecastable behavior

I particularly like a few sentences from the article, which really point out important issues in data mining:

"No software, no matter how powerful, and no analyst, no matter how talented, can guarantee perfect (or even highly accurate) forecasts."

"Forecast accuracy is ultimately limited by the nature of the behavior being forecast."

Read more of Sandro Saitta blog.

Here is the article Worst practices in business forecasting