Foster Provost

A critical skill in data science is the ability to decompose a data-analytics problem into pieces

Classification and class probability estimation attempt to predict

Regression (“value estimation”) attempts to estimate or predict

Regression is related to classification, but the two are different.

classification predicts whether something will happen, whereas regression predicts how much something will happen.

Similarity matching attempts to identify similar individuals based on data known about them

Clustering attempts to group individuals in a population together by their similarity

Co-occurrence grouping (also known as frequent itemset mining, association rule discovery, and market-basket analysis) attempts to find associations between entities based on transactions involving them

Profiling (also known as behavior description) attempts to characterize the typical behavior of an individual, group, or population. An example profiling question would be: “What is the typical cell phone usage of this customer segment?”