Information Generation: How Data Rule Our World

by David J. Hand

Information Generation is the story of the seminal role data plays in our lives and explains how the advance of our civilization has come hand in hand with our ability to collect and interpret data. Starting with occasional scratching on cave walls, eminent statistician David J. Hand guides us right up to the modern era where society is completely dependent on an abundance of data systems for its very survival.

Genres: Mathematics, Science

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 29, 2006

About the author

David J. Hand is Senior Research Investigator and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and Chief Scientific Advisor to Winton Capital Management. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a recipient of the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society. He has served (twice) as President of the Royal Statistical Society, and is on the Board of the UK Statistics Authority. He has published 300 scientific papers and 25 books: his next book, The Improbability Principle, is due out in February 2014. He has broad research interests in areas including classification, data mining, anomaly detection, and the foundations of statistics. His applications interests include psychology, physics, and the retail credit industry - he and his research group won the 2012 Credit Collections and Risk Award for Contributions to the Credit Industry. He was made OBE for services to research and innovation in 2013.

Reviews

[Oliver Ford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suitable for a wide audience, this is a good thing, though I probably would have preferred deeper look into the mathematics.

[Alasdair Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, the best (most novel) part of this book is contained Chapters 6 and 7, in which Professor Hand gives an overview of sources of error and fraud in data, and how to detect and correct them. My favourite of Hand's examples is the description of how engineers mis-presented and mis-interpreted data on failure of O-rings versus temperature, leading to the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Otherwise, it's a good jaunt through the history of science, from a data perspective.

[Kyle Polich · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I read in 2015. David has the vision of someone that's thought a lot about data science and shares it with us in this easy to read volume.

[Jacob Ledbetter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poorly written, overly verbose, hard to follow.