Comments on: Birds of a Feather Shop Together

By: Guy Azar

Guy Azar — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 11:43:47 +0000

This is a brilliant research in terms of data collection.
Well done.
however we KNOW that social attributes cannot draw a vendor the entire picture of what products is a person likely to purchase, when and for how much.

It is fairly intuitive to conclude that social is a part of a multi-variable algorithm, bringing into calculation the usual demographics as well as social shopping / engagement variables people manage with one another and the brand.
you have the data to make a step in that direction

By: Guy Azar

Guy Azar — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 11:43:18 +0000

This is a brilliant research in terms of data collection.
Well done & thanks for the share

however we KNOW that social attributes cannot draw a vendor the entire picture of what products is a person likely to purchase, when and for how much.

By: ebrosh

ebrosh — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:24:15 +0000

Hi Sharad,
Thanks for the interesting (and fun) article.
I’m not clear on something though: you write referring to the top line: “When friends (alters) on average spent $400 during the six-month observation period, the consumer herself (ego) spent nearly $600”.
Yet if I’m reading the plot correctly, when the alters spent on average $200 (i.e. less than the typical spender) the Ego still spent nearly $500. For prediction, if there’s a correlation for high spending, shouldn’t there be one for low spending? Shouldn’t the leftmost plot point on the top line be lower than the dotted line?
I guess I’m not reading the graph correclty? Perhpas you could explain the dot-size and that would shed some light on it?
Thanks.
PS – excuse my late comment :) I only happened to come across this post now.

By: Sharad Goel

Sharad Goel — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:08:27 +0000

@Cong: Yeah, that’s right, we only have data on friends who are in the registry. But the predictions can only get better by including data on more friends — if they didn’t then we could always exclude the extra data and we’d be left with our same old predictions.

By: Cong Yu

Cong Yu — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:13:43 +0000

Is it true that you analyze subset of the friends who are in the offline retailer registry, but not those who are not? Do you know the percentage of each and will the result still be significant among _all_ friends?

By: Sharad Goel

Sharad Goel — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:36:53 +0000

@Hadley: Sure, I’m happy to cite ggplot2. It’s a shame that the utility of such tools isn’t self-evident.

By: Hadley Wickham

Hadley Wickham — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:07:26 +0000

It’s neat that you’re using ggplot2 – but would you mind citing it in your papers? Citations really help me to show to my colleagues that producing software is useful and does have an impact on the practice of statistics. Thanks!