This blog post is a follow-up to Anomalies: Drivers of Progress. In that article, we discussed data science anomalies and higher education, including current tactics (i.e., during the unfolding of the pandemic), the September postmortem diagnosis, and future model updates. Here [...]

What is Bias? Bias is a multifaceted concept and to have an honest discussion, we first need to establish what we mean by bias. If you look up bias on Wikipedia, you will find several related meanings.sup>1 Here is the opening paragraph of the article: “Bias is [...]

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny...”- Isaac Asimov Newton’s law of universal gravitation made successful predictions for hundreds of years. Then one odd anomaly in Mercury’s orbit changed [...]

Over the last few posts, we’ve established that for the most accurate predictions for enrollment, you want a solution built with machine learning. But not all machine learning is created equal. Some solutions apply the same algorithm across all of the institutions it works with [...]

Over the last few posts, I’ve talked broadly about predictive analytics and higher education. While there are many great insights gained by using predictive analytics, you need to consider the data science driving the solution. Is it based on linear regression or is it machine [...]

Last week on the Othot blog, I talked about why higher education institutions should use predictive analytics. This week I’ll discuss one area where predictive analytics can have a tremendous impact: enrollment management. A predictive analytics tool for enrollment should answer [...]

Predictive analytics is the practice of extracting information from existing data sets in order to determine patterns and predict future outcomes and trends. In essence, predictive analytics makes predictions about the future, for example, enrollment targets. Organizations are [...]

I sometimes wonder how many people have heard of John von Neumann.1. No, he is not a sports legend or something along those lines. John von Neumann was a child prodigy who became one of the most important and prolific mathematicians of the 20th century with major contributions [...]