Nate Silver made a name for himself with his uncannily accurate predictions of baseball scores and US election results. But some things – from earthquakes to terrorism – even he can't predict
If there's one group with an incentive to get predictions right, it's shops – and luckily for them, whether online or off, they've got a stack of data to do it.
There's a reason shopping habits bear that name, Silver says: people generally buy similar stuff time and again, and retailers pick up on that and are trying to take advantage of it.
"Macy's is testing 50,000 different versions of its catalogue, targeted at different customers," he says. "That's a business where you can go further than you can in other domains."
