Long tail

A shape of data with a big crowd of small values and a thin trail of a few giant ones, such as customer spending.

Other terms from the same lesson

• feature engineering: Turning raw data into inputs that make a pattern easier to learn, like days since last purchase.
• lifetime value: The total a customer has spent with a business so far, or is expected to spend over the whole relationship.
• quintile: One of five equal-sized groups you get by sorting values and cutting the line into fifths.
• RFM: Recency, frequency, monetary: scoring customers on how recently they bought, how often, and how much they spend. A classic marketing feature set.
• tabular data: Data in rows and columns, like a spreadsheet: one row per customer, one column per fact about them.