In episode "Correlation or causality?" David Wells, VP and co-founder of Cigar Sense, explains the key principles that drive the accuracy of our cigar recommendations. He also talks about the differences between online recommendations based on data correlation, aka big data analytics,  as opposed to recommendations based on data causality, aka deep data analytics.

In statistics, "correlation does not prove causality" refers to the inability to legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables solely on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them.

Bottom line, on one hand you can invest virtually all you can on marketing, get millions of consumer data for and through correlation based recommendations, and hope you will make at least 50% of those millions happy with what they buy next. On the other hand, you can invest in a sensory panel, in samples, in training, in curing the data, in continuously monitoring the algorithm performance over thousands of consumers and make 90%+ of them happy. We believe that, belonging to the second example, we are ready to scale up.

On another note, correlation and causality are obviously also referred to when science attempts to demonstrate flavor precursors from different terroirs. Are they managing to find causation? More on this, and on a lot more, in our online tasting course. Stay tuned.