Real-world data is incomplete and imperfect. The right way to handle it is with Bayesian inference. Michael Williams demonstrates how probabilistic programming languages hide the gory details of this elegant but potentially tricky approach, making a powerful statistical method easy and enabling rapid iteration and new kinds of data-driven products.

Chao Zhong offers an overview of a new predictive model for customer lifetime value (LTV) in a cloud-computing business. This model is also the first known application of the Fader RFM approach to a cloud businessa Bayesian approach that predicts a customer's LTV with a symmetric absolute percentage error (SAPE) of only 3% on an out-of-time testing dataset.