Dark Data
Why What You Don't Know Matters

Hands down, one of the most useful layman texts I’ve read all year, perhaps the past 3 years. “Dark Data”, written by British statistician David Hand, discusses one of the least well-understood/talked about subject matters in the data-analysis process flow, dealing with missing data. Why this is th......more

Pop-stats book about missing data: how to detect it, how to reason about it, how to compensate for it (single and multiple imputation, the EM algorithm, bootstrapping) and ways we use it to our advantage ("blinding" study participants, anonymisation, Bayesian priors). A clear presentation of the mat......more

I bought this book expecting to read about non-standard sources of data and new ways to use existing data. But it only repeats the classic problems of censoring and sample bias, which can be found in any introductory statistics textbook (often using the same textbook examples), and which anyone with......more

A lot of important data is lost, not collected or simply not available. This book tries to shine a light on the fact that a lot of important data is dark - sometimes for very good reasons. The book is rather sprawling and lacks focus. By trying to shoehorn subjects as disparate as Sokal's hoax and t......more

I was expecting to embark on a fascinating journey to the depths of the dark web or something equally mysterious but unfortunately I was mislead by the title. The author goes through, in detail and with numerous examples, how we live in constant darkness because we never have all the data about any......more