The Danger in "Just Data"

When allied with domain knowledge, analytics can be key in finding the sources of uptime losses and margin leakage. However, results can prove sensitive to the context of the data, and sometimes data analysis can produce faulty outcomes. I would like to be able to tell you, (as a CTO of a startup machine learning company once told me), "just give me the data and I will sort out the problems." Unfortunately, it does not work like that. Data analysis techniques including machine learning are portable across industries, domain knowledge is not – and you need both to succeed.