In the introduction to his book, "Super Crunchers" (see blog entry from a few days back), Ian Ayres leads off with the story of Orley Ashenfelter. Ashenfelter crunches numbers. Using decades of weather data, he found that low levels of harvest rain and high average summer temperatures produced the greatest Bordeaux wines.
In fact, he reduced his theory to a formula:
Wine quality = 12.145 +0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature - .00386 harvest rainfall. Guess what? He has been very accurate, predicting that the 1989 vintage would be the best in a long time and 1990 would be even better.
Bill James did the same thing for baseball, as explained in Michael Lewis's "Moneyball".
In newspapers, where I have worked, some publishers have had success in finding causal relationships between various factors such as the weather, sports team's success and so forth to predict store and vending machine sales. And they are using these models to plan their newspaper distribution.
Ayres concludes that in field after field, "intuitivists" and traditional experts are battling Super Crunchers, and that is a big part of his book.
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