You have to know the past to understand the present, said the Late Great Carl Sagan.

You have to know the past to understand the present, said the Late Great Carl Sagan.

Who am I to argue with the king of the astronomers BUT COVID has changed the world as we know it, the way we think, and the way we make decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has confused data analyst, marketers and even some scientists as the sudden and major change in consumer behavior have made predictions based on historical data nearly useless.

When it comes to predicting demand or consumer behavior, there is nothing in the historical data that resembles what we see now.

Let me give you a simple analogy of the problem of this problem. If you want to predict how long it is going to take to drive from A to B in London next Thursday at 18:00, you can ask a model that looks at historical driving times, and possibly at various scales. For instance, the model might look at the average speed on any day at around 18:00. It might also look at the average speed on a Thursday versus other days in the week, and at the month of April versus other months. The same reasoning can be extended to other time scales as one year, ten years, or whatever is relevant for the quantity you are trying to predict. This will help predict the expected driving time under “normal” conditions. However, if there is a major disruption on that particular day, like a football game or a big concert, your traveling time might be significantly affected. That is how we see the current crisis in comparison with normal times.

But there are solutions

Trace Data Science and similar companies work on a technique called “adaptive goal-directed behaviour”

When we make a system adaptive it is going to adjust itself based on that current data when it recognizes performance dropping off.

Simply Even us humans need to adapt to this “new normal” by updating our own internal parameters to help us better forecast how long it will take to do the weekly shop or choosing a new optimal path when walking down the street.

A scientific approach allows us to look at these problems with a far different approach to that of a marketer or a lead generation specialist we look at the problem at the core taking into account every single variable.