Stats from recordings: case study in basketball

The Wall Street Journal reported on a new business that will take video of a high school and college  basketball game and perform some impressive indexing and data pulling in order to generate statistics for coaches to use in improving their team.  Here's a clip from CNBC (beware, there is likely a commercial at the beginning: 






The dissection of a game into parts that can be recorded, tracked, and analyzed is one of the basic premises of data analysis.  Without the data, coaches are left to manage based on anecdotal evidence, or with past lure (as dipicted in Moneyball).  But once data has been collected and information gleaned from it, coaches are able to see the effects of their decisions and individual players abilities.  From the WSJ article:

"For coaches, Krossover's results can be rather shocking. For years, Tammy Lusinger, head coach of the girls' basketball team at Mansfield Summit High School in Arlington, Texas, had a favorite play called "Bama" in which the girls cleared out one side of the court then set up a series of screens to free a player for an open shot. "It's a great looking little play," Lusinger said last week.

"But after she started using Krossover, she was in for a surprise: The numbers showed that they were only scoring on that play 5% of the time. Earlier this month, Lusinger and Mansfield Summit won their second Texas state championship in the last four years."

The difficulty lies in the data collection part.  Krossover is able to harness cheap, but capable labor to scrutinize every tape one at a time.  Businesses with thousands of operations may not have the luxury of the same capabilities; however, I'm not sure why they could not.  For example, a manager of a McDonald's could record the interactions of cashiers and have them indexed, sliced, and diced the same as a basketball coach.  This might bring up images of a "Big Brother"  firm that records and analyzes every movement of it's employees.  On the other hand, it may bring to light the differences between stellar employees and just good employees.

Survival rates of heart patients differ depending on marital status

Wall Street Journal reported today on a study about survival rates of heart patients:

In a study of nearly 600 heart-surgery patients, unmarried people were nearly twice as likely to die as married people within five years of the procedures. For married patients, the survival rate was roughly 85%; for the unmarried, 70%

I'm not sure how "nearly twice as likely to die" was calculated given the numbers:
25% of married patients die or 1 in 4, so twice as likely would be 2 in 4 of 50%.
Instead unmarried patients die at a rate of 30% or 1 in 3, not exactly "nearly". There is likely another calculation that is not jumping out at me.

Also, the bigger more revealing part of the story is here:

Much of the long-term difference could be explained by unmarried patients being more likely to smoke (a behavior that spouses can influence, naturally).

So the headline could have read "People who smoke are more likely to die than those who don't after heart surgery (oh, and people who smoke also have a higher chance of being single). But, then no one would read it ad it wouldn't make a heart warming (pun intended) story about how marriage can literally save your heart (of which I full heatedly (it's too easy) agree).

What would it mean to your business if a certain segment of customers was found to be less receptive to your offering and by less receptive I mean will be more likely to die?