Is Less Really More?

A marked difference between the Indian cooking style and the Western way of cooking (which would include say Italian, French, Mediterranean, Continental to count a few) is the number of spices/elements used in a recipe.  In a recent episode on Fox Life – David Rocco’s Dolce India, there was a face-off between David and Chef Rajdeep of ITC Hotels – friendly of course. They both decided to make meat balls. The fact that Chef Rajdeep’s meat balls are better known as Galouti Kebabs is another issue !!! While the Indian Chef used about 20+ spices his Italian counterpart used only about five.

 

This gives rise to a favorite debate amongst foodies – who has a more evolved palate? The Indian foodies like to believe that their sense of taste is more evolved – their taste buds can pick out several distinct flavors in one dish. The Europeans on the other hand feel that a dish should have one distinct flavor which is its signature or identity. At best there can be a second flavor which comes as an after taste. Who is right and who is wrong – well your point of view is as good as mine!!!

In case you are wondering why I am talking about food on this forum – for one it is a passion for me;  but more importantly we come across a similar issue with analytics of unstructured data. Unstructured data is by definition – well, unstructured. Therefore, any reports or insights you try to get from this data is not defined by strict rules. The question which the analyst faces on a regular basis – should I make just one or at best two inferences from this myriad of information (the European palate) or do I look at all aspects that this data provides to get multitude inference which may or may not be actionable (the Indian taste).

Similar to the cooking styles, we believe this does not have a right or a wrong answer. Ideally, the defined objective of the exercise should give us the direction to follow. For example – if it is a hypothesis that is being tested then the approach has to be very focused without any scope for distractions from noise. However, if the objective is to discover unknown unknowns then we have to look at all possible inferences which the data throws up. You never know which discovery may be the most important one!!

Afterthought – Culinary tastes and cooking techniques are not a reflection of anyone’s approach towards analytics…the analogy has been drawn to make the reading more interesting!!

The author is the Co Founder of Vondasoft Technologies which is a Mumbai based technology start-up. Vondasoft has developed an algorithm for unstructured data analysis and specializes on Social Listening and Analytics.