On the 10th Day of Analytics — Addition and Subtraction (Column A + B = Analysis)

Yesterday, on the 9th Day of Analytics Matt Dew talked about “simplifying your life.” Today we are going in a different direction and are doing “simple analytics.” On the new analytics features in GeoIQ is the ability to do addition and subtraction across columns in your dataset. Seemingly a simple ability, it can also be quite powerful.

One way you can use it is to measure Twitter influence. I subtracted Twitter followers from number of people a user followed. Then I created a map with two layers, one of people had more followers than people they follow and the other of people who follow more people.

The addition feature can be especially useful for adding together populations to create a total. In this map I took number of females under 16 and number of males under 16 and added them together. By using addition you can create targeted population groups for your analysis.

So remember that “column A + B = analysis,” not to be confused with the 2Gether video “U + Me = Us.”