Re: All hail Neo!

On 26 Apr 2006 10:04:11 -0700, "Marshall Spight" <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]

>Let's say I had a customer database with 1000 customers in
>it, and I have the age of 999 of them, and one null. Let's say
>I hire an analyst because I want to study some things about
>my customer database. Maybe I want to do some TV advertising,
>so I want to know some things about the demographics of my
>customers. I ask the analyst, what is the average age of my
>customer base, and what does each decile look like? The
>analyst comes back later, and says, the average age of
>our customer base is unknown. For each decile, there are
>100 people, and the average of each decile is unknown,
>and the range of ages in each decile is unknown. I'm going
>to fire that analyst and get a good one.

     So would I. I would also fire a consultant who represented incomplete data as being complete. I want to see the assumptions, say:

     "We took your customer database as of 2006-04-01 and analysed it by age as requested. Of the 1000 rows, one did not have age data, so we discarded it from consideration." etc.

     If the analysis had non-age-related parts, then would that row be considered? Again, I would read the assumptions.

[snip]

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko Received on Wed Apr 26 2006 - 14:30:53 CDT