Linked here is the blog for a company that specializes in “data science & predictive analytics:” Elderresearch
It is run by Dr. John Elder, someone who I have known for more decades than I care to admit. We have not had much intersection in our respective businesses, although I did talk to him in 2007 about the use of classification trees when we were doing work on insurgencies. This work is summarized in my book America’s Modern Wars. In particular we were using them in our Task 12 report: Examining the Geographic Aspects of an Insurgency, dated 4 February 2008. We did both a logistic regression and several classification trees looking at terrain and its effects on insurgencies. I ended up getting a three page paper from John where he independently ran his own logistic regression from our data and ended up with results similar to ours. It was a useful (and free) confirmation of what we were looking at.
I generally was not happy with the results I was getting from these comparison and there was clearly some factors far more significant than terrain that was driving the results of these conflicts. This is what lead us to look at force ratios and insurgent cause. Somewhere between the first and final draft of the book, I did delete the classification trees from the book.
I gather some of Elder Research’s work is based upon classification trees. Most of his work is commercial. They do have a new blog, but with only one blog post so far in there “defense and intelligence” category. It addresses the third off-set strategy: defense-and-intelligence
