Author Archive | Lewis Perdue

New research recently published in the journal Neurocomputing shows one more reason why consumers get little help in choosing wines from the descriptions in wine reviews: the same words mean different things to different people. This fits in with — MISINTERPRETATION: Words = Big Trouble — which is one of the issues that we have […]

“[N]o event or object is ever experienced in perfect, objective isolation. It is instead subject to our past experiences, our current mood, our expectations, and any number of incidental details—an annoying neighbor, a waiter who keeps banging your chair, a beautiful painting in your line of sight. With something like wine, all sorts of societal […]

Wine and music: please our senses, touch our emotions, beg to be shared, are deeply engrained in how we define ourselves and, can determine how other people judge us. Because of those factors, every recommendation system in use today — including those deployed by Pandora, Spotify, Slacker and other online music sites — fail because of: […]

Complaints about the use of personal information for everything from predictive product recommendations to credit ratings and consumer credit card interest rates have provoked lawsuits,  increasing consumer outrage,  and a growing chorus of demands for tighter governmental controls. The greater accuracy of the Tribes algorithm plus its ability to perform in a totally anonymous data […]

Recommendations from big data predictive methods are a lot like the use of epidemiology to determine the cause of a disease: Both rely on the statistical analysis and correlation of massive amounts of data. Both are indicative that something is happening. Both can offer insights into a phenomenon. Both are easily derailed by unknown confounding […]