Hi ,
Michelangelo's statue of David is widely considered to be one of the greatest sculptures of all time.
Shortly after completing the statue, Michelangelo was asked by the Pope how he managed to create such a masterpiece, to which Michelangelo supposedly replied:
"It's simple. I just removed everything that wasn't David."
Two emails I received yesterday (from the mailing lists of two friends of the list) made me think of this quote.
The first, from indie consultant strategy advisor Rod Aparicio, included the following:
"Without a perspective of the world, you can't have a definitive approach to it, you can't have a clear direction. It all becomes bland.
And all being bland is like just adding more noise to the noise.
People learn to ignore it."
Then, from independent business guru Jonathan Stark:
"Your clients don't know what you know.
They aren't experts in what you do.
They usually can't connect the dots between your observations and stated facts, and what they need to do differently.
So...
If you want your clients to do something, tell them what to do in clear terms that anyone could understand."
Here's the thing...
When you're fitting a supervised learning model to a dataset, your aim is to capture the underlying relationships in your data (the signal) while ignoring everything else (the noise).
Do this successfully, and your model will generalise well to unseen future situations.
Capture the noise instead of the signal, and your model will be worthless.
As with Michelangelo's David, the best results are achieved by removing everything that isn't the pure signal.
Yet, as the two email quotes above demonstrate, this same approach also delivers the best results when it comes to communicating the outcomes
of your modelling work.
More often than not, in data science, your stakeholders don't have a clue as to what you do and your job is to make them understand.
But unless you have a clear
idea of the message you are trying to send - your signal - the message you're delivering is going to come across as nothing but noise.
Talk again soon,
Dr Genevieve Hayes.
