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Not Your Normal Data: The Impact of the Outlier

Outliers deviate from the norm. But outliers can tell us more about our data, how we gather it, and what is in it, if we examine the data set carefully.
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

At least 5% of data contains anomalies. Some are errors, many are valid. Try using the IQR, inter-quartile range, to determine whether outlier data is valid. Deleting outliers is another way,  but there are better methods.

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Anomalies
Outliers, aberrations, fat tails, trouble at the mill and maybe something good once in awhile
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How The January Effect Has Evolved Over The Decades

How The January Effect Has Evolved Over The Decades | Anomalies | Scoop.it
The January effect may have been a pronounced trend in the past, but in more recent years, it’s delivered diminishing returns.
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Reuters: Former Uber rival flags down SPAC business model

Reuters: Former Uber rival flags down SPAC business model | Anomalies | Scoop.it

A former Uber Technologies rival is flagging down a new business model. Gett once aimed to challenge the $84 billion giant in the ride-hailing market...

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Gett is a combination ride sharing, taxi, limousine scheduling and tracking service for large companies, in order to control costs of employee travel. It is considering an IPO via a SPAC this year, and valued at $1 billion. Seems  unlikely to be a successful business model in the US, although it could be in Europe, South America, and maybe East Asia.


Ground transit is only 5% of all business travel expense.


In the US, rental cars are a sizable portion of employee ground travel (in suburban and non-urban areas) which isn't included by Gett, and is already cost controlled for companies through other services.


Unknown impact of Coronavirus and continued remote rather than in-person business activity.

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Junk Bond Funds Just Experienced A Six-Sigma Event

Junk Bond Funds Just Experienced A Six-Sigma Event | Anomalies | Scoop.it
It's like flipping heads 29 times in a row.
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

I don't have much to add. This is an all-time record outflow. Source data is good, Goldman Sachs and Lipper.

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Changes in Brent Market: Declining Production and Underinvestment

Changes in Brent Market: Declining Production and Underinvestment | Anomalies | Scoop.it
This report discusses current conditions in Brent production and investment and addresses some of the peripheral issues affecting Brent. Read report.
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

These changes have been unnoticed by the energy community and media. Critical issues are the exceptionally low levels of investment in the Brent oil-producing region and declining stocks. Falling production in the Brent region relative to expanding investment and production in the US and West Texas Intermediate region is a key part of the story

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Investigating the Investigations - X Marks the Spot

Investigating the Investigations - X Marks the Spot | Anomalies | Scoop.it

"Most of the financial crimes investigators I know live in a world where they dream of moving things from their Inbox to their Outbox..."


Via Tony Agresta
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

The field is enterprise fraud detection. Investigating is the starting point. Adjudication is the final outcome of fraud detection and analysis.


Data (repositories such as enterprise data warehouses)  +

Technology (secure sharing across jurisdictions, automated link discovery, non-obvious relationship detection and identity resolution) are used to uncover insights which result in adjudication and closure of a complex incident investigation.

Tony Agresta's curator insight, December 3, 2013 2:48 PM

Here's another good post from Doug Wood of www.fightfinancialcrimes.com.   Advances in technology are revolutionizing how fraud investigations are being done today.

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Nanex ~ The Cost of HFT

Nanex ~ The Cost of HFT | Anomalies | Scoop.it
The cost of #HFT - new charts showing growth of quotes vs trades since 2000 http://t.co/YYI2XNpGf1
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Now versus 1999: 100 times as many quotes, same trading volume

Chronology: Reg NMS - January 2006

Advent of high frequency trading - March 2006

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The Protectionism of Food Safety Standards in International Agricultural Trade

The Protectionism of Food Safety Standards in International Agricultural Trade | Anomalies | Scoop.it
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Iowa State University used compliance with Maximum Residue Levels of pesticides in food as the basis for a proxy index of trade protectionism by country. An index value of 1.0 means there are no trade barriers. Values greater than 1.0 indicate magnitude of relative protectionism.


Values less than 1.0 are anomalous and potentially harmful, by under-protecting the health of consumers. The index value for the U.S. is slightly less than 1.0.

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Making some Noise about Signals: The Benefits of Predictive Analytics

Making some Noise about Signals: The Benefits of Predictive Analytics | Anomalies | Scoop.it

Adoption of predictive analytics has not taken off as one may have, well, predicted.

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Those who don't plan to begin using predictive analytics until 2015 or later are now the largest group in the community, and greater (proportionally) than in the previous two years.

 

"The media’s love affair with data-driven predictions has not proven infectious in the Business Intelligence community."

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Fed: It’s Not Clear Exactly How Fed Bond Buying Works

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York president says some key aspects of how the central bank’s bond-buying stimulus effort works remain mysterious.
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

The current policy of years of prolonged bond-buying is unprecedented for central bankers.  

'Mr. Dudley also said that when it comes time to unwind the Fed’s easy-money stance, uncertainty is a major issue facing central bankers.  “There could be unintended consequences” about moving to a more normalized state of monetary policy..."'


Reassuring, no? I have a difficult time believing this was the Fed's prefered course of action. They are not foolish, nor short-sighted. Other than Alan Greenspan, the Fed Board of Governors have few business or political ties, e.g. Ben Bernanke was an economics professor in North Carolina for his entire career. Former president Bush made a good choice with Bernanke.

 

I wish all the best to Janet Yellen! She is highly qualified. I don't think assumptions should be made, that she is "dovish". We'll see.

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North Korea: Witness to Transformation | Slave to the Blog: Economic Priorities

North Korea: Witness to Transformation | Slave to the Blog: Economic Priorities | Anomalies | Scoop.it

Today, we report on economic news and analysis that reveals regime priorities.

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

This mobile subscriber time-series data doesn't make sense!

~ 2 million mobile subscribers is equivalent to 1 in 8 North Koreans owning a phone.  

~ In North Korea, mobile phones cost $170 to $700.

~ North Korea's GDP per capita is only $5 per day.

 38North.org analyzes in more detail, without a conclusive explanation.

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Earnings Roundup: Company-Issued Guidance at Its Most Negative Level on Record

Earnings Roundup: Company-Issued Guidance at Its Most Negative Level on Record | Anomalies | Scoop.it

The current N/P earnings guidance ratio of 11.4 for Q4 2013 is the worst on record.

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

S&P 500 companies have issued negative expected earnings guidance 103 times and positive guidance only 9 times. This 11.4 negative-to-positive (N/P) ratio is the highest (worst) on record, ever. The highest N/P ratio prior to this quarter was 6.8 for Q1 2001. 

* The data is incomplete, as it was collected in late November.

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Q3 2013 Sees Highest Catastrophe Bond Issuance in 15 years

Q3 2013 Sees Highest Catastrophe Bond Issuance in 15 years | Anomalies | Scoop.it

NASDAQ - NEW YORK  6 Nov 2013

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

What happened 15 years ago, during Q3 1998? Fears regarding Y2K maybe?  I'd take a look at that.

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Estimating rates from a single occurrence of a rare event

Estimating rates from a single occurrence of a rare event | Anomalies | Scoop.it
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Use survival analysis rather than event rate.

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Quantitative Easing and Lipper U.S. Mortgage Funds Fund Flows | Lipper Alpha

Quantitative Easing and Lipper U.S. Mortgage Funds Fund Flows | Lipper Alpha | Anomalies | Scoop.it

U.S. mortgage funds set a weekly record of inflows at $1.7 billion. This prompted us to review flows during past central bank purchases and tapering announcements.

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Magnitude and direction of mortgage flows are related to monetary policy, but other factors have strong influence too. The key here is this nice chart of 13 years of Fed Open Market Committee activity.

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Will Too Much Data Blind You to a Data Breach on Your Network?

Will Too Much Data Blind You to a Data Breach on Your Network? | Anomalies | Scoop.it

A series of disconnected events can be used to identify a threat.


 


Imagine your system alerting you that one of your endpoints has received a suspicious file from a suspicious site. It generates a low priority alert that gets lost in the flood of other alerts.


The infected endpoint connects to several popular news sites and downloads their front page. This will not generate any alerts. What happened is that the infected endpoint just confirmed network connectivity. 


After several hours, your alert screen, having wrapped a few hundreds of times since the infection, reports another low priority alert. The infected endpoint (bot) is now trying to locate other bots by looking up randomly generated URIs based on dynamic DNS domains. Your IPS sees this as a number of failed DNS queries followed by a successful one. The newly infected bot then connects to another bot downloading its payload with no traffic traversing the IPS since it is not communicating outside. 


Does this sound far-fetched and unlikely, like an extreme example? Well, this is how Kraken works, and the Kraken botnet has been active since at least 2008.

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

"Next-gen" Intrusion Protection Systems can be misleading. The primary concern should be stronger security infrastructure, while making the best use of analysts’ time.

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Bellwether or Anomaly?

Bellwether or Anomaly? | Anomalies | Scoop.it

The Rise and Apparent Fall of the New gTLD .PW

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

There’s been a lot of speculation about how domain registrations will fare as the new ICANN gTLDs come online. PW is the ccTLD for Palau. While registration for .PW domains ramped up quickly, interest wasn't sustained for long, see chart. It is still too early to know the cause though..

 

Also, .PW is a ccTLD, not one of the new "vanity" gTLDs, which presumably have more cachet that Palau (although most if not all are much lengthier strings than .PW).

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Media Coverage of Analysis of AP CS 2013 Exam Results

Media Coverage of Analysis of AP CS 2013 Exam Results | Anomalies | Scoop.it
Barbara Ericson does an annual analysis of AP CS exam results. Her 2013 analysis attracted significant media attention.
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Some articles did a poor job with the statistics, so Kevin Karplus did a model-based analysis of Barbara's data. He was able to identify in which states the under-representation was truly significant.

Best press coverage: NYTimes Bits blog, going beyond just the shocks in the 2013 results, e.g. the situation in computer science has worsened over time. In Wyoming, for instance, no high school student of ANY race or gender took the test, while 35 students took the test there in 2001.

 

Worst press coverage:  Huffington Post used Barbara's results as an indication of how unimportant Computer Science is! 

"True, she was trying to point out there were too few computer science-focused girls compared to bio and math, but seriously, if that's our biggest problem..."

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Graph-based Anomaly Detection and Description: A Survey

This survey aims to provide a general, comprehensive, and structured overview of the state-of-the-art methods for anomaly detection in data represented as graphs..

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Via arXiv

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Highway Trust Fund Ticker | U.S. Department of Transportation

Highway Trust Fund Ticker | U.S. Department of Transportation | Anomalies | Scoop.it
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Based on current spending and revenue trends, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that the Highway Trust Fund will run out of money to maintain and repair surface roadways before the end of the fiscal year (in mid October 2014). Anticipation of a deficit scenario is already impacting transportation planning at the state level, including Arkansas and Georgia.

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Old tails: a crude power law fit on ebook sales

Old tails: a crude power law fit on ebook sales | Anomalies | Scoop.it

We use R to take a very brief look at the distribution of e-book sales on Amazon.com.

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

The chart is log-log. It is a plot of daily e-book sales versus Kindle e-book rank for Amazon.com's top 50,000. I don't see much of a tail.

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A Long Tail of Whales: Half of Mobile Games Money Comes From 0.15 % of Players

A Long Tail of Whales: Half of Mobile Games Money Comes From 0.15 % of Players | Anomalies | Scoop.it

"One player spent about $10,000 per month on in-app purchases. The company... assigned an employee to cater just to that whale, to ensure that she was always satisfied with the game."

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

This sort of extreme revenue concentration indicates that mobile gaming remains speculative, as a business AND as an investment.

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Une erreur de stratégie et un manque de vision...

Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola… Pourquoi tous ces grands noms de l’industrie technologique ont-ils mis un genou en terre? Et pour d’autres être phagocyter?


Via Hugues Rey
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Google announced that it sold its Motorola operations, but not patents, to Lenovo yesterday.

IBM announced the sale of its low end server business to Lenovo yesterday.

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Pipeline Safety Tracker

Pipeline Safety Tracker | Anomalies | Scoop.it
Every year the nations oil and natural gas pipelines suffer hundreds of ruptures and spills. We map major pipeline accidents from 1986 to the present.
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Pipeline technology at scale was developed 50+ years ago. Ruptures due to material weld equipment failure decreased since 1986, ranging from 16% to an all-time historical low of 8% in 2001. However, incidents due to material weld failures tripled the next year, and continued rising, to 30% in 2010 and 2011. Absolute counts of pipeline incidents per year have been stable since 1986. What's going on with these material weld equipment failures???

A few possibilities to consider are:

1. normal wear and tear, given the weld materials' expected lifetimes;

2. poor maintenance;

3. higher corrosiveness of the pipeline contents than expected or than in the past.

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Noisy Information and Fundamental Disagreement

Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

Very noisy! "We study the term structure of disagreement of professional forecasters for key macroeconomic variables."

 

Conclusion - There is great uncertainty about the short term AND long run, even by those who should know. Downward sloping GDP, in the U.S.A. and globally, is conceivable, rather than an extremely low likelihood catastrophic scenario.

This tells me that there is an unusual lack of confidence, and fear.

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Corrosion Testing Procedures Adapt to Rising Air Pollution

Corrosion Testing Procedures Adapt to Rising Air Pollution | Anomalies | Scoop.it
Intel develops new testing protocols after seeing uptick in corrosion levels on server boards and connectors used in Asia-Pacific region.

Via kenekaplan
Ellie Kesselman Wells's insight:

This won't affect Intel alone. I would expect others to take similar measures, and if not, would wonder why. This seems to be an important consideration for operations in that geograhic region, and soon enogh, everywhere.

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