In reality, there is no real correlation between the winner of the Super Bowl and the
performance of the stock market. Winning a football game is no indicator of economic
performance of the nation. The fact that for many years there actually was a correlation
proves that if enough trends are compared, somebody will find a correlation somewhere
even if the correlation occurs by simple coincidence.

There may be many reasons why false-positive readings occur. Consider an analysis of
Internet sales. One looks at the results of a sale and starts to draw conclusions. In many
cases, the conclusion is correct and valid. But one internet sale occurred because
someone's cat walked across the keyboard at just the wrong time. There is no legitimate
conclusion that can be drawn from an occurrence such as that (Fig. 9.1.4).

Fig. 9.1.4 A false positive.

False-positive readings can occur for a huge number of unknown and random reasons.

Heuristic Processing

Analytic processing is fundamentally different than other types of process. In general,
analytic processing is known as “heuristic” processing. In heuristic processing, the
requirements for analysis are discovered by the results of the current iteration of
processing. In order to understand the dynamics of heuristic processing, consider classical
system development life cycle (SDLC) processing.

Chapter 9.1: Repetitive Analytics: Some Basics