Online Program

Opportunities in Causal Business Analytics

Keywords: business analytics, statistics, data mining, operations research, marketing, customer relationship management

In the business world, quantitative analytics fields such as Statistics, Data Mining, and Operations Research have been widely applied in many areas for decades. Many telecom, retail, and credit card corporations, for examples, routinely make use of customer data to understand customer needs and predict future behavior, resulting in highly targeted actions to improve customer relationships and maximize profitability.

Actions of firms may include sales interactions, direct mails, web page optimization, product recommendation, pricing change, new product development or broadcast advertising. Do we know a business action is successful? How to carry out scientific experiments in business? How to use advanced analytics to optimize your goals?

This seminar will discuss how to address the causal impact of business actions. The process includes design, measurement, predictive modeling, and optimization. We will illustrate with marketing applications. Methodologies employed include A/B testing, fractional factorial design, propensity scoring, statistical modeling, time series analysis, machine learning, and integer programming. Similar applications can be found in personalized medicine.