{"id":1461,"date":"2011-05-26T14:42:31","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T18:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1461"},"modified":"2011-05-26T14:42:31","modified_gmt":"2011-05-26T18:42:31","slug":"so-what-correlates-with-operations-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/05\/26\/so-what-correlates-with-operations-research\/","title":{"rendered":"So What Correlates with Operations Research?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google Labs has a new tool called Google Correlate.<\/a> Google provided some early correlation results during the 2008 flu season when it showed that search count for certain terms (like “flu” presumably) could be used to estimate the prevalence of flu in an area.\u00a0 This led to Google Flu Trends<\/a> (it appears that currently only South Africa has many cases of the flu).<\/p>\n

You can now play this game on your own data.\u00a0 Have a time series over the last 9 years or so?\u00a0 You can enter it into Google Correlate and see what search terms are correlated with the data.<\/p>\n

Even easier is just entering a search term:\u00a0 it will then return other correlated search terms.<\/p>\n

If you are going to periodically write in something called “Michael Trick’s Operations Research Blog”, it is clear what to do next:\u00a0 search on “Michael Trick” (it is required to egotistically search on your own name first, right?).\u00a0 No dice:\u00a0 I’m not popular enough to justify a search (sigh…).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But, of course, “operations research”<\/a> works fine.\u00a0 What\u00a0 correlates with that phrase?\u00a0 Turns out lots of interesting things:\u00a0 “signal processing”, “information systems”, and … “molecular biology”?\u00a0 What are the common features on these terms?\u00a0 Well, they were relatively more common search terms in 2004-2005, relatively flat in the past three years, and have a strong seasonality, corresponding to the start of the academic year (“Hey, I signed up for Operations Research:\u00a0 what the heck is that?”).\u00a0 Whether it is operations research, signal processing or molecular biology, it appears lots of academic departments begin September with students frantically searching on their subjects.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>We can try another term with some currency:\u00a0 “business analytics”<\/a>.\u00a0 The result is somewhat surprising.\u00a0 “Thank you email”?\u00a0 “Vendor portal”?\u00a0 “Zoes Kitchen”?\u00a0 It seems hard to make much sense of this.\u00a0 As we know<\/a>, “business analytics” is a relatively new term and the search quantity is less than that of “operations research” which perhaps explains the spurious correlations:\u00a0 there are so many terms that are searched as often as “business analytics” that the highest correlations come more or less randomly.<\/p>\n

To data people like us (me, anyway), the ability to search correlations is endlessly fascinating.\u00a0 Shift the operations research time series by 13 weeks and what do you get:\u00a0 things like “portable mp3” and “retriever pictures”:\u00a0 clearly our students are bored with our course and are surfing around for something more entertaining.\u00a0 What does “management science” search correlate with?\u00a0 “introduction” and “social research”.\u00a0 Is there anything interesting to be learned by the differences in correlates between operations research and management science?\u00a0 Nothing springs to mind, but there might be a thesis or two there.<\/p>\n

I am not sure what any of this means, but it sure is a great way to spend an early summer afternoon!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google Labs has a new tool called Google Correlate. Google provided some early correlation results during the 2008 flu season when it showed that search count for certain terms (like “flu” presumably) could be used to estimate the prevalence of flu in an area.\u00a0 This led to Google Flu Trends (it appears that currently only … Continue reading “So What Correlates with Operations Research?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web","category-business-analytics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}