Avoiding a common mistake with time series

Tom Fawcett is Principal Data Scientist at Silicon Valley Data Science. Co-author of the popular book Data Science for Business, Tom has over 20 years of experience applying machine learning and data mining in practical applications. He is a veteran of companies such as Verizon and HP Labs, and an editor of the Machine Learning Journal. A basic mantra in statistics and data science is correlation is not causation, meaning that just because two things appear to be related to each other doesn't mean that one causes the other. This is a lesson worth learning.