News headlines often compress complex science into a simple storyline: If two things are happening at the same time, one must ...

Businesses that rely on correlation will be misled with increasing confidence. Businesses that master causation will navigate complexity with increasing clarity.

Causation and correlation may sound alike but are very different. The former means the root of subsequent events, while the latter refers to an actual or apparent relationship between trends in which ...

CORRELATION, CAUSATION, AND BLOGGING....Kieran Healy is annoyed: You only have to hang around the world of social science research- or policy-related blogging for a few hours before you come across ...

Data purists would rap my knuckles for asking this question and reply, "Never". On the other hand, "data sophists" who're accustomed to lying with Big Data in even more crude ways would wonder, “Duh, ...

In traditional decision making, the metrics that impact the bottom line will almost always take precedence over the underlying drivers of change. The reasons behind a purchase decision fade into ...

A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. In this instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word ...

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Carl Spaulding, executive vice president ...

A recent blog post on Moz by Cyrus Shepard caused quite a stir in the SEO community. This stir was rooted in part over lack of understanding of the difference between correlation and causation, and in ...