How far in advance are flights cheapest? An error of interpretation

Posted on Wed 06 January 2016 in TDDA • Tagged with tdda, errors, interpretation

Guest Post by Patrick Surry, Chief Data Scientist, Hopper

Every year, Expedia and ARC collaborate to publish some annual statistics about domestic airfare, including their treatment of the perennial question "How far in advance should you book your flight?" Here's what they presented in their report last year:

Figure: Average Ticket Price cs. Advance Purchase Days for Domestic Flights (Source; Expedia/ARC)

Although there …

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Generalized Overfitting: Errors of Applicability

Posted on Mon 14 December 2015 in TDDA • Tagged with tdda, errors, applicability

Everyone building predictive models or performing statistical fitting knows about overfitting. This arises when the function represented by the model includes components or aspects that are overly specific to the particularities of the sample data used for training the model, and that are not general features of datasets to which …

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