Rich data, poor data

Original post:  Mar 12, 2015

Yesterday, I posted about a math whiz who is trying to help clinicians understand who gets cancer and why (Dr. Data). I believe that there are many mysteries that are ultimately "solvable" with the proper application of statistical analysis. The trick is in getting to that proper analysis. Sometimes you don't have any data to analyze. Sometimes you have so much that it is difficult to tell the chaff from the wheat.

We have often heard that healthcare is different from other industries. It is, but it isn't always a positive. There have been many articles written recently that talk about the wide variance in cost between medical procedures. I plan to post next week about one article I saw that found the exact same blood procedure could be priced at $10 or $10,000 depending on where you had the procedure done.

When you have an industry that considers itself an outlier, one of the best ways to help it change is to use models developed in other industries and adapt them to fit to the specialized nature of healthcare. I believe that data analysis is similar.

This article from FiveThirtyEight by Nate Silver discusses the use of data analysis in sports. Sabermetrics in baseball helped pave the way for detailed analysis in all the major sports. Theories that once were held only by fringe elements are now considered mainstream. It's hard to believe that when I was a boy, only a handful of people understood what "on base percentage" was and, more importantly, why it figured so prominently in baseball! Today, we routinely accept nuggets of information like the distance each player is estimated to have run in the course of a soccer match ticking across the bottom of our screens.

Mr. Silver goes on to explain why statistical analysis has done so well in sports.

1. Sports has awesome data. There are not just reams of statistics everywhere you turn. It is also rich data. Silver defines rich data as accurate, precise, and subject to rigorous quality control.
2. In sports, we know the rules. With a common understanding of the goals and objectives, we can generally agree on those measures which show gains or losses.
3. Sports offers fast feedback and clear marks of success. "Winning", as defined by the rules of the game, becomes the ultimate arbiter of success. With regular intervals of games adding rich sources of new data, you can test theories quickly and determine whether or not they are achieving the results you expected.

Here is a link to the full article:  Rich Data, Poor Data | FiveThirtyEight