W. Edwards Deming Quotes

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

Statistics may be defined as "a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty.

I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.

I've never been a stat guy.

Scientific data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the data, then there is no use in collecting any. The ultimate purpose of taking data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation for action. The step intermediate between the collection of data and the action is prediction.

It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence.

We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.

The great temptation of Big Data is that we can stop worrying about comprehension and focus on preventive action instead. Instead of wasting precious public resources on understanding the 'why' - i.e., exploring the reasons as to why terrorists become terrorists - one can focus on predicting the 'when' so that a timely intervention could be made.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

The current fad in economic forecasting is to project so far into the future that no one will be around to hold you accountable.

There are two kinds of economists in the world. Those who don't know the future and those who don't know that they don't know the future.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

Managers used to say, 'I have a gut feeling.' Do you know what a gut feeling is for a professional manager? It's a pattern that they recognize. But if your system can recognize that pattern, if it's not just a couple of managers who know that pattern, then the system's gut feeling can tell you which way to go. That's really liberating.

Watson augments human decision-making because it isn't governed by human boundaries. It draws together all this information and forms hypotheses, millions of them, and then tests them with all the data it can find. It learns over time what data is reliable, and that's part of its learning process.

It's easy for me to see how a business proposition is going to play out, or who our next-generation competitors are, from taking this data point from this customer and another data point from another customer... and jump to Z.

Obviously it's a statistics game.

Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.

Every day we go over data and use science and data to drive policy and decision-making.

I'm an analytics girl.

It is not predictions but plans that make the future. If you want predictions, it is because you do not have the ability to make a plan and fulfill it.

Whether baseball or football, we're tasked in front offices with making decisions under uncertainty. How do you corral that uncertainty in a way to make more consistently better decisions? That's very similar.

Statistics are there to be broken.

In disciplines as disparate as baseball, financial services, trucking and retail, people are realizing the power of data to help make better decisions.

Networks love data. They love to be able to look at numbers and try to predict what they think will work.