Blog: David Loshin

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Beer and Diapers

First of all, the canonical example of the power of data mining and preditive analytics, the correlation of purchasing beer and diapers, is widly misused. The notion is that that through analysis, one data miner discovered that males typically buy diapers along with beer, and this is typically followed by explaining why males buy beer with diapers, and then saying that putting beer and diapers together will increase overall sale of both items.

Anyone familiar with urban legends would immdiately be dubious, and so I did a quick search and found a http://www.dssresources.com/newsletters/66.phpgood analysis of the history (and relevance) of diapers and beer.

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