Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

…EVER!

While normal distributions are nice and wonderful, they aren’t really feasible in the world of finance. This is because the market can be so volatile and fickle that variances become meaningless.

So, enter fat-tailed distributions. These are distributions where events deviate significantly from the mean in comparison to normal distributions. What this means in terms of the stock market is that assets and investments are prone to jumps (in either directions).

On this topic, Paul Kedrosky links to an interesting presentation on Fat Tailed distributions by Northfield, the guys that make analytical and investment software.

It’s quite interesting and talks about some work that’s being done in this area.

On a related note, another area of application for Fat tailed distributions is the CRM arena. Contact-centers and self-service applications (i.e. IVRs) receive millions of calls a day, and there is just as much variation in C-sats, agent performance, AHT and so on.

It would be interesting to apply some of these tools and techniques to call-center analytics and see how well those work.