Demographics vs Psychographics for Machine Learning
When preparing data for data science, data mining or machine learning projects you will create a data set that describes the various characteristics of the subject or case record. Each attribute will contain some descriptive information about the subject and is related to the target variable in some way.
In addition to these attributes, the data set will be enriched with various other internal/external data to complete the data set.
Some of the attributes in the data set can be grouped under the heading of Demographics. Demographic data contains attributes that explain or describe the person or event each case record is focused on. For example, if the subject of the case record is based on Customer data, this is the “Who” the demographic data (and features/attributes) will be about. Examples of demographic data include:
- Age range
- Marital status
- Number of children
- Household income
- Occupation
- Educational level
These features/attributes are typically readily available within your data sources and if they aren’t then these name be available from a purchased data set.
Additional feature engineering methods are used to generate new features/attributes that express meaning is different ways. This can be done by combining features in different ways, binning, dimensionality reduction, discretization, various data transformations, etc. The list can go on.
The aim of all of this is to enrich the data set to include more descriptive data about the subject. This enriched data set will then be used by the machine learning algorithms to find the hidden patterns in the data. The richer and descriptive the data set is the greater the likelihood of the algorithms in detecting the various relationships between the features and their values. These relationships will then be included in the created/generated model.
Another approach to consider when creating and enriching your data set is move beyond the descriptive features typically associated with Demographic data, to include Pyschographic data.
Psychographic data is a variation on demographic data where the feature are about describing the habits of the subject or customer. Demographics focus on the “who” while psycographics focus on the “why”. For example, a common problem with data sets is that they describe subjects/people who have things in common. In such scenarios we want to understand them at a deeper level. Psycographics allows us to do this. Examples of Psycographics include:
- Lifestyle activities
- Evening activities
- Purchasing interests – quality over economy, how environmentally concerned are you
- How happy are you with work, family, etc
- Social activities and changes in these
- What attitudes you have for certain topic areas
- What are your principles and beliefs
The above gives a far deeper insight into the subject/person and helps to differentiate each subject/person from each other, when there is a high similarity between all subjects in the data set. For example, demographic information might tell you something about a person’s age, but psychographic information will tell you that the person is just starting a family and is in the market for baby products.
I’ll close with this. Consider the various types of data gathering that companies like Google, Facebook, etc perform. They gather lots of different types of data about individuals. This allows them to build up a complete and extensive profile of all activities for individuals. They can use this to deliver more accurate marketing and advertising. For example, Google gathers data about what places to visit throughout a data, they gather all your search results, and lots of other activities. They can do a lot with this data. but now they own Fitbit. Think about what they can do with that data and particularly when combined with all the other data they have about you. What if they had access to your medical records too! Go Google this ! You will find articles about them now having access to your health records. Again combine all of the data from these different data sources. How valuable is that data?
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