Bayesian Decision Theory

[kandrathe]

My experiences have only been through osmosis from my spouse who's undergraduate degree is in applied statistics. While working on her masters degree she worked as a demographer for a retailer. She seemed to be able to make predictive models for human behavior based on a myriad of economic variables, but only for short periods of time. I remember many variaties of segmentation models and confidence intervals. So from her work, I can see that statistics can be beneficial predictive tool if applied correctly. But, she was a mathematician who was constantly struggling with co-workers who wanted to apply voodoo.

The other area I've worked in is in applying neural networks to predict specific commodity prices. The difficulty is in capturing all the real world factors that influence the price.