Ask HN: Why is it so difficult to get great insights from data? - cneumann81
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mswen
1] You are not measuring the "important" phenomena

2] Measurement error obscures the signal

3] Missing data

4] Data coming from disparate parts of a system may not have been collected at
the same unit of analysis

5] Domain experts may have really good mental models of how various factors
relate to each other so when you do analysis of data it mostly confirms what
the experts already know and is therefore "not very insightful"

6] Too many variables, not enough cases

7] Data sparsity

8] Necessity to combine the skills of a researcher with those of a domain
expert (both of those elements can have at least moderately steep learning
curves)

9] Time pressures - great insights that arrive too late for action are useless

10] Combinations of any or all of the above

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minimaxir
...it's not?

Do you have an example?

~~~
cneumann81
Well, in business, it seems that most deciders have difficulties to find the
real important insights in their data. Dashboard are nice, but they often
don't reveal the really relevant stuff. They show you only what you know, but
no interesting data patterns. I wonder why this is? Is it a tooling issue, a
skill problem, ...?

