Utah Digital Marketing Collective’s – Data Mining Bootcamp With Luciano Pesci, PhD

Jessi and I attended a 3-day bootcamp through Utah DMC. The bootcamp was led by Luciano Pesci, PhD, Founder and CEO of Emperitas. The purpose of the event was to educate and provide those of us attending with knowledge and tools for creating predictive models, which could be applied to nearly any possible business situation or analysis.

Before getting to the deep stuff, Luciano presented the foundation for a data scientist to have – the Data Gospel. Data accessibility has progressed at an alarming rate.

Data is treasure. Being able to understand and use data, to a certain extent, gives the ability to predict the future. The problem is that many data projects fail because organizations lack a true data culture. And it can be hard to develop or grow that aspect of a company’s culture.

After learning the foundational principles of the Data Gospel, how to properly classify data, as well as other principles of data science, we dived into deep analysis of a real business data set. We were only given a very small sample of the original data – about 300 rows in an excel spreadsheet worth. Luciano held the rest of the data, which contained later performance data of that company. In order to see how well we could use a predictive model, we based all predictions and analysis from that >10% chunk of data. Then, we brought in the actual future results and compared them against our prediction.

This bootcamp was incredibly valuable because we were able to test predictive modeling while taking a true scientific approach. We were able to compare actual predictions to real data without having to wait 10 years to see how well we actually did.