Incommensurate
May. 23rd, 2012 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleSigh... my Florida client has a really big data analysis problem. I've been thinking of a metaphor to describe it, and it's like this.
Suppose you were offering a "How Tall Am I" service. You have a big database of people's heights all over the world, and someone comes in wanting to know how they "measure up". You take out your ruler, measure them, and tell them (for example) "at six feet, you are taller than 40% of people in the Netherlands, and taller than 95% of people in Cambodia." So far, so good.
Then one day, the company that makes rulers says "We don't think measuring height is such a great thing anymore, so we are discontinuing our rulers. Please measure weight instead. Here's a scale you can use."
So someone comes in and wants to know how they measure up. If they have a typical BMI, you can still guess with some confidence how tall they are and give them a reasonable answer. But when someone comes in that's 5'6" and weighs 400 pounds, and you say "You are taller than 90% of people in the Netherlands", they know right away that something's wrong and conclude that you're a fucking idiot.
This is a pretty accurate analogy for what's going on now, except instead of "size" we are measuring gene expression activity in mouse brains. As you might imagine, the measurements involved are vastly more complicated. The problem is compounded by the fact that not everyone understands that rulers and scales are built to measure different things. Yes, they're correlated, and yes, they are both ways of measuring how "big" someone is. But you can't assume that the measurements are directly or reliably comparable. My client's customers are quite frustrated because they have been sent barking up several very unproductive trees because of this difference - they're looking for things that are really tall, and mostly ending up with things that are simply fat.
I was worried that the big Japanese drug company who is paying for all this was going to cancel their contract. As it turns out they are quite understanding and realize that we are working hard to make the best of a difficult situation. But I definitely have a lot of work to do in the next little while.
Suppose you were offering a "How Tall Am I" service. You have a big database of people's heights all over the world, and someone comes in wanting to know how they "measure up". You take out your ruler, measure them, and tell them (for example) "at six feet, you are taller than 40% of people in the Netherlands, and taller than 95% of people in Cambodia." So far, so good.
Then one day, the company that makes rulers says "We don't think measuring height is such a great thing anymore, so we are discontinuing our rulers. Please measure weight instead. Here's a scale you can use."
So someone comes in and wants to know how they measure up. If they have a typical BMI, you can still guess with some confidence how tall they are and give them a reasonable answer. But when someone comes in that's 5'6" and weighs 400 pounds, and you say "You are taller than 90% of people in the Netherlands", they know right away that something's wrong and conclude that you're a fucking idiot.
This is a pretty accurate analogy for what's going on now, except instead of "size" we are measuring gene expression activity in mouse brains. As you might imagine, the measurements involved are vastly more complicated. The problem is compounded by the fact that not everyone understands that rulers and scales are built to measure different things. Yes, they're correlated, and yes, they are both ways of measuring how "big" someone is. But you can't assume that the measurements are directly or reliably comparable. My client's customers are quite frustrated because they have been sent barking up several very unproductive trees because of this difference - they're looking for things that are really tall, and mostly ending up with things that are simply fat.
I was worried that the big Japanese drug company who is paying for all this was going to cancel their contract. As it turns out they are quite understanding and realize that we are working hard to make the best of a difficult situation. But I definitely have a lot of work to do in the next little while.
