Living on the Baseline

 Reactions guide predictions. I can sum up this entire article with those three words, but then there won't be a good story to share!

 

 

"I will become very annoying in a few days", my grandmother announced.

 

"How are you so sure?"

 

"Well because winter will set in, my joints will sear with pain, and the feet will become swollen again. All of this will leave me agitated and irritated."

 

Grandma will be turning 75 this year and has no clue what data modelling is or how time series analysis works. For most folks, the capability to 'predict' the future is either a miracle only a few are born with or is a major scientific breakthrough which involves a lot of complex calculations and mathematical jargon.

 

It is, and it is not.

 

Fundamentally, the crux of most data-centric models lies in plotting a commodity's performance (let's say the quantity of a product sold) over its lifespan to understand the ripples created by several orchestrating elements. We'll call these elements as features. Each feature, or the independent variable as we have no control over them, interacts with the overall performance, or the dependent variable as it is dictated by the features, to come out with a possible outcome. Some features may be more dominant than the others, and this too varies from one product to another. Feature engineering, or identifying the features which has the most impact on the output, remains one of the most crucial pieces of data modelling. For example, a weather forecast model taking into account 'number of times the US President used the word covfefe' won't be of much use, would it? (Or maybe, who knows! :P)

 

With me so far? Then voila, my friend you now understand the fundamentals behind data modelling. But did you really need all the gyaan I just provided? You may have been aware of it the whole time, without even realizing it!

 

My grandma, without having the faintest idea about data modelling, knew about the mood changes she will experience cometh the winter months. She knew this as it happens to her every year. Monday in its vicious cycle brings with itself The Blues for most of us, so much so that I know people who apply for a Monday leave well in advance out of anticipation (if you are reading this, *wink wink*). And we all know much in advance the effect that a delicious plate of biryani will have on our digestive systems - to be precise 'I haven't eaten it yet but YOLO' much advance. These are all features that dictate future actions.

 

Right from the onset, we make decisions in our life based on certain parameters. Something as small as the time we go to sleep can impact our enthusiasm and energy levels for the next day. On a macroscopic level, the careers we chose depend upon a lot of these daily measures. To some, materialistic satisfaction is of utmost importance. For others, it could be the dream of seeing new places and faces each day. There are still those who believe in the notion of serving others. The choices we make in our day to day life play a crucial role in shaping whom we end up as. But how we respond to various stimuli make us take those choices in the first place!

 

Data modelling as a field may be new but modelling as a concept has been omnipresent for a long time. And like all good product models, real-life models (read: people) can be really successful in predicting future happenings if we can determine the attributes that affect them! Still, one of the most dreaded scenarios is where your data simply do not react!

 

"Let's watch a movie! Which one? Oh, anything is fine!"

 

"You want to order food? Anything is fine. Pizza, which flavour? Anything works!"

 

"This colour looks all right. That one? Yeah, even that is fine!"

 

The word which has the highest frequency in the Bible is "the". In fact, the usage of this word is so common, it has already occurred 5 times in this sentence block so far! In my day to day conversations though the word I see gaining a lot of popularity off late is - fine. Fine is just baseline. Oh, they even rhyme!

 

Let's take a very simple data model. Quantity of an item sold over time, and the only feature affecting our model is its price. Now, assuming everything else is static, reducing price should give me a performance boost in standard modelling conditions. Likewise, a bump in price should have an adverse effect. If this holds true, I can easily gauge the effect of future price changes on my product's performance. But what if price changes do not affect my product at all? If I sell it for $12 or $15 a pop, I get the same sell-through. Can I still predict future performance based on just price? Absolutely not!

 

We have modelling features in our life as well. The colours we like, the food we eat, the places we travel to, and the people we meet are all very good examples. The trouble is, we have stopped reacting to them! If I respond to "yeah that works fine" for all the food items on the menu and eat anything and everything out of it without giving anything specific attention, how would I ever know what I really like? If I behave with the same discretion with everyone who gives me company, how am I ever going to know which of the people are close to me and which are just acquaintances!

 

We often talk about surviving each day. And as brilliant as that strategy is, how about living each day on its merit, or still better, getting more life out of each day? Sure there are going to be a lot of lows in your life. Numerous bland days will line up, but in between those there will be days full of opportunities. But then there would be hesitation - your body will try to hold you back in anticipation for the universe to collapse. And all that would separate from 'what is' to 'what could have been' is that lack of leap of faith when it mattered. Because all that was cared about was surviving, not living!

 

As important as it is to ride out the lows, it is equally if not more important to be at our best when the good days roll in! This year's birthday was a special milestone for me. Celebrating my 25th, this was the first time in eight years I was supposed to celebrate it in my hometown with the family. I ended up being involved in an ugly accident. A lorry, behind my car and on the adjacent lane, took an abrupt turn and crashed into the left side of my car's body. It scrunched the rear door, leaving behind a gaping hole, and then scrapped against the driver's side window smashing it to bits and pieces. A hefty bill and wounded arm later, what left me shaken was not the accident itself, but the fact that it happened when I was trying to drive as safely as I could have! This accident made me push even more in the days to follow. I don’t think I had kept myself as busy as I did in the entirety of the last week - from churning out assignments to talking and reaching out to as many people in my phonebook as I could! 14th September this year could have been another regulation birthday for me. It turned out to be a low point. And hence there was this bundle of extra energy within that egged me on for the entire week to outshine the mishap of that one day. Another 25 years later when I roll back the clock, I am sure I will look past that one day's low for a whole week's high! Had I not gotten out of it the way I did, I would have ended up with this feeling of 'should I drive again?' for a very long time. In fact, I did not let anyone else drive the car to the repair shop the day after. It had to be me. Looking at the rearview mirror, I wish to be not reminded of the accident, but how I coped up with it in its aftermath.

 

If you have made it so far, please bear with me a little more. Sorry for the strong flow of optimism throughout this article! No, you absolutely don't have to emulate me. Or even like me. I know you must have had days when you felt cornered off. The feeling of letting go would have been much stronger than the feeling of holding on. What may have appeared to be mundane days to others must have been a solace for you. And that is fine! There is no harm in laying low for a few days or even weeks. All I ask from you is to not be permanently bogged down. To not give up on the good things in life because of a few bad moments. To not suffocate who you really were before! Five close calls with death, and all I can say from personal experience, is this:

 

Your scars should not be a sign of you failing, but of you dusting yourself and getting back up on your toes to fix yourself.

 

A batsman rattled by a bouncer goes inside a shell and expects every other delivery to be a bouncer. And in doing so, misses out on the freebies that need to be put away! How you react to a situation today will dictate what life will throw at you tomorrow. More often than not, it is not the chances that dry up, but our enthusiasm to take those chances in our stride that dies down. We give up on our dreams, stop doing the things we were once good at because we have become too comfortable in the notion of just surviving, of just living on the baseline!

 

Reactions guide predictions. I can sum up this entire article with those three words, but then there won't be a good story to share!