Thursday, September 29, 2011

Sports Analytics

Tom Davenport writes a good review on Moneyball. A different take on in than Roger Ebert would present - but you will probably learn more from Davenport's commentary. You can read it here: http://blogs.hbr.org/davenport/2011/09/six_things_your_company_has_in.html .

Sports analytics is becoming serious business. MIT annually hold a sports analytics conference the aptly named  MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference . There is also a great company based in Chicago, but operating globally, which houses massive volumes of sports data (also aptly!) named STATS . STATS have been collecting sports data for over 30 years and supply most of the player stat data shown on screen in televised sports events. As you can imagine the demand for this type of data is increasing, as is the sophistication of the data which can be presented. STATS recently purchased the Israeli company SportVU which among other things automates the gathering of player and ball movement data. This space is set to become very interesting for data scientists.

Feel free to add to the comments - what innovative things would you be aiming to do with the base sports statistical data if you were a company like STATS?

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Predicting Hospital Admissions - 11Ants Analytics Excels in First Milestone of Heritage Health Prize

Some time ago I wrote about the Heritage Provider Network Health Prize . The goal of the prize is to develop a predictive algorithm that can identify patients who will be admitted to a hospital within the next year, using historical claims data. This competition is hosted by the revolutionary and cool site Kaggle.

If you can do this better than anyone else you get $3 million USD for your trouble. Nice. Though as you would expect when someone is nonchalantly handing out $3 million - you are far from the only one that benefits...according to Heritage in 2006 well over $30 Billion USD was spent on unnecessary hospital admissions. This is a prime example of deriving value out of data and refreshingly not just financial value - anybody who has spent any time in a hospital knows that it is not much fun. You will also know that the ripple from hospital admissions travel far and wide, from the patient themselves, to medical staff, to employers, to friends and family, to insurance companies, and so it goes on.

One of the few universal truths would certainly have to be the more people we can keep out of hospital the better.

The premise is that if we can identify patterns in claims data that helps to predict which patients are at risk of being admitted to hospital (a very expensive event on every metric) we can intervene, and can even afford to spend a reasonable amount of resource on such interventions to try to keep the patient out of hospital.

We at 11Ants Analytics entered this competition and to date are pretty pleased with the results. At the end of the first milestone we are placed 13th out of 971 players - which places us in the top 1.3% of contestants.

So if you are an executive at an insurance company, a health maintenance organization, a provider network, or a government health scheme, and would be interested in applying advanced predictive analytics to pulling tens of millions of dollars, to hundreds of millions of dollars out of your costs, feel free to get in touch. We would be very interested to discuss.