On a mission to make more practical sense of data
Information-design guru Edward Tufte threatens that every time someone gives a PowerPoint presentation, he will kill a kitten. Kaiser Fung knows Tufte is only kidding, but Fung is still concerned.
Focal Point
The Role of JMP
Fung sees JMP as a tool for helping make the argument to businesspeople to choose one action over another.
A statistician with Sirius XM Radio and author of Numbers Rule Your World, Fung has seen too much not to be concerned – too many slides jammed with absurd amalgamations of information.
There’s so much information to ponder, so readily at hand. But insights are often lost in the clutter or lack practical value.
Don’t get Fung wrong: He is in favor of data and data-driven decision making. He worries about how presenters lose the audience when conveying quantitative information.
“A lot of things are needed in order to bring insights about numbers to the point where you can get nontechnical people to move in a direction that is essentially driven by evidence and not simply by data,” Fung says.
“I really think that the analytics community should spend more time thinking about how we can most effectively get to that point,” he adds.
An animated bubble plot like this one produced in JMP can help decision makers quickly spot trends and patterns over time.
Storytelling
Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has said that the sexy job in the next 10 years will belong to statisticians.
Could be, Fung responds. But what’s for certain is that statistics is increasingly appreciated in a number of fields and in our popular culture at large. This is due in large part, he says, to writers like Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, and Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers.
“I think we do a great job with what I call the first half of analytics,” Fung says, “which is the stuff Gladwell and the Freakonomics guys talk a lot about. If you read those books, they’re very focused on counterintuitive findings and amazing insights.”
But we miss the second half of analytics, which Fung says is, ultimately, the measure of success. In this second half, decisions – in public policy and the business world, for example – are based on informed interpretations of data.
It’s about how we come to reach that aha! moment, Fung says. The objective is to package the information and the insights that come out of it, and then – and this is critical – tell a compelling story.
“One thing I’ve learned over the years is that it’s best not to go in front of businesspeople and try to make a mathematical argument,” he says. “You really need to speak to them through stories.”
Constructed with a few clicks and drags of a mouse, this contour graph uses color density to show where the data is concentrated and where it is sparser.
Fung’s primary focus at Sirius is marketing analytics, and understanding and predicting customer behaviors. It’s technical work, but he has banned statistical jargon from his team’s presentations.
“I never talk about p-values,” he says. “I never use words like ‘regression.’ Throwing jargon into the presentation of data just isn’t effective. It leads to more questions, and it sometimes leads to suspicion because people think you’re just throwing these difficult things at them.”
Fung says that you can’t really get buy-in unless you come up with an effective way of explaining to a businessperson why you’re recommending one action instead of another. And you must offer a persuasive reason for why the information you’re providing is of practical importance.
He says an analogy would be spending a lot of time talking to a consumerabout how a car was built but not getting around to discussing how to operate all the accessories.
“People have different viewpoints on this. I’ve heard some people say that the right way to do it is to explain it in such a way that the businesspeople can understand the math. But that’s not what I want to do. I just want them to understand in a general sense why ‘A’ is better than ‘B.’ And it’s probably the nonmathematical argument that will be most effective,” he explains.
The Partition platform in JMP enables you to find groupings of inputs that can best predict the variation in an output. The process of splitting the data is recursive – you continue it until you get a useful fit.
The challenge
So, statistician is the sexy job of the next decade?
Fung demurs: “I don’t know if it’s sexy. But I certainly see a lot of opportunities in the business world for people in this area. I also see it as a job that is much more interesting and varied than most jobs out there because the core skill is more of a problem-solving mindset.
“You’re dealing with different problems all the time as the business conditions change, and the really good people will be those who can balance the technical and the business skill sets,” he adds.
“Having that right combination is still pretty rare. So I actually do agree that statistics is a great place to be for people with those talents.”
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“It’s only half about the numbers. The other half is about how you get something that is most likely to impact a decision.”
Kaiser Fung
Statistician, Sirius XM Radio
Kaiser Fung is a professional statistician with more than a decade of experience applying statistical methods to unlocking the relationship between marketing and customer behaviors. He leads a team of statisticians at Sirius XM Radio that is responsible for gaining insight into customers and operational best practices.
Fung is a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and an adjunct professor at New York University, where he teaches practical statistics to professionals. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, in addition to statistics and engineering degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities.
Popular as a featured presenter at analytics conferences, Fung was a keynote speaker at the JMP Discovery Summit 2010 in Cary, North Carolina. His speech was titled “What Happens After the Math Is Done?”
His blog, Junk Charts, pioneered the critical examination of data and graphics in the mass media: junkcharts.typepad.com
Fung is also author of Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Numbers and Statistics on Everything You Do.
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