Tiger Moms, Ninjas and Chips - Oh My! Uncovering the story in the data - @mrogati's talk at Ignite Google I/O 2011

MonicaRogati – data scientist at LinkedIn. “Tiger Moms, Ninjas and Chips, Oh My! Uncovering the story in the data”
A few months ago there was this huge “tiger mom” controversy on parenting styles and outcomes. As a data geek, my first instinct was – let’s look at the data! But what kind of data do we have?
There are 100Mil people on LinkedIn – and their public profiles include their last name, location and job title.
What this means is, we can look at people’s last names & their region, sprinkle some machine learning, and have a reasonable guess on the origin of the name.
We can then look at the United States & look at which job titles are *over-represented*for a particular name origin.
So, going back to the Tiger Moms, it turns out that the Tiger Cubs do value scholastic achievement and statistics – but they’re not the only ones. We can run this analysis for any name origin.
it turns out Eastern European names look quite similar…
… we can contrast them with Western European names who seem to optimize for different metrics.
So what else is on LinkedIn? People’s career histories going back to the 70s – and this allows us to ask questions like “Where are people going?” “What’s the hottest industry?”, “What are the fastest growing job titles?”
What were the fastest growing titles in a given year? We can see the tech boom in 1999 and the bubble bursting as people go back to grad school. Today, we see the rise in social media & of course, data scientists
..and, finally, we can see fads in job titles goingfrom “gurus” to “ninjas” to “rock stars”. So HOW do we find stories like these in the data?
There are 3 simple ingredients. We have to aggregate across interesting dimensions, normalize the raw data, and dig. Let’s see a few examples of what this means.
Looking at job promotions by month and country reveals interesting patterns, like rediscovering India’s fiscal year.
Normalizing raw data is essential -- there is always a denominator. Look for what is over-indexed, not just popular. To see the trend here, we looked at the relative change.
Finally, ask why . For the promotions data, we took a look at when people were born. And here is our explanation for the trend: Millenials don’t care what month it is, they want their promotions.
Let’s take another example. What first names are over-represented among CEOs? You might look at the list and say – well, those are just popular baby names 50 years ago. But that’s not the whole story – you have to dig.
Look at the length of the names – now that’s an interesting story! There’s Chip, Todd and Trey - the quintessential sales guys. The CEO distribution is not as skewed – but they still want to be your friend -- so they use nicknames. It turns out, the media loved this stuff. So how do you COMMUNICATE the data stories? Infographics are awesome – but the story itself has to be…
… interesting – to get people talking about it; It has to be accessible, so it’s easy to understand by a large number of people; and it has to be relatable – Howard Stern covered it because Howard was one of the names.
So obviously there are a lot of interesting stories in the data. We all love data & want more of it –that’s IS my license plate. But raw data isn’t enough – you have to DIG to find the real story.
If you love discovering stories & big data, let’s talk!

Tiger Moms, Ninjas and Chips - Oh My! Uncovering the story in the data - @mrogati's talk at Ignite Google I/O 2011

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Tiger Moms, Ninjas and Chips - Oh My! Uncovering the story in the data - @mrogati's talk at Ignite Google I/O 2011

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