Tom Davenport to Keynote at PAW New York

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message from Predictive Analytics World. If you are NY based you may want to drop in and listen.———————————————————————————-Tom Davenport to Keynote at
Predictive Analytics World New York

Take advantage of Super Early Bird Pricing by May 20th and recognize savings of $400. Additional savings when you bring the team*

Announcing Tom Davenport Keynote:
Thomas Davenport Every Day Analytics:
Making Leading Edge Commonplace
Thomas Davenport
President’s Distinguished Prof, Babson College
Author, Competing on Analytics & Analytics at Work

Join your peers October 17-21, 2011 at the Hilton New York for Predictive Analytics World, the business event for predictive analytics professionals, managers and commercial practitioners, covering today’s commercial deployment of predictive analytics, across industries and across software vendors.

PAW NYC
 promises to once again break records as the biggest cross-vendor predictive analytics event ever. The conference program is packed with the top predictive analytics experts, practitioners, authors and business thought leaders, including keynote addresses from Thomas Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, and PAW Program Chair Eric Siegel, plus special sessions from industry heavy-weights Usama Fayyad and John Elder.

RAVE REVIEWS:I came to PAW because it provides case studies relevant to my industry. It has lived up to the expectation and I think it’s the best analytics conference I’ve ever attended!

Shaohua Zhang, Senior Data Mining Analyst
Rogers Telecommunications

Hands down, best applied analytics conference I have ever attended. Great exposure to cutting-edge predictive techniques and I was able to turn around and apply some of those learnings to my work immediately. I’ve never been able to say that after any conference I’ve attended before!

Jon Francis, Senior Statistician
T-Mobile

PAW NYC’s agenda covers black box trading, churn modeling, crowdsourcing, demand forecasting, ensemble models, fraud detection, healthcare, insurance applications, law enforcement, litigation, market mix modeling, mobile analytics, online marketing, risk management, social data, supply chain management, targeting direct marketing, uplift modeling (net lift), and other innovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.


Take advantage of Super Early Bird Pricing and realize
$400 in savings before May 20, 2011.

Note:  Each additional attendee from the same company registered at the same time receives an extra $200 off the Conference Pass.

Register Now!


eMetrics New York

Predictive Analytics World Conference –New York City and London, UK

Please use the following code  to get a 15% discount on the 2 Day Conference Pass:  AJAYNY11.

Predictive Analytics World Conference –New York City and London, UK

October 17-21, 2011 – New York City, NY (pawcon.com/nyc)
Nov 30 – Dec 1, 2011 – London, UK (pawcon.com/london)

Predictive Analytics World (pawcon.com) is the business-focused event for predictive analytics
professionals, managers and commercial practitioners, covering today’s commercial deployment of
predictive analytics, across industries and across software vendors. The conference delivers case
studies, expertise, and resources to achieve two objectives:

1) Bigger wins: Strengthen the business impact delivered by predictive analytics

2) Broader capabilities: Establish new opportunities with predictive analytics

Case Studies: How the Leading Enterprises Do It

Predictive Analytics World focuses on concrete examples of deployed predictive analytics. The leading
enterprises have signed up to tell their stories, so you can hear from the horse’s mouth precisely how
Fortune 500 analytics competitors and other top practitioners deploy predictive modeling, and what
kind of business impact it delivers.

PAW NEW YORK CITY 2011

PAW’s NYC program is the richest and most diverse yet, featuring over 40 sessions across three tracks
– including both X and Y tracks, and an “Expert/Practitioner” track — so you can witness how predictive
analytics is applied at major companies.

PAW NYC’s agenda covers hot topics and advanced methods such as ensemble models, social data,
search marketing, crowdsourcing, blackbox trading, fraud detection, risk management, survey analysis,
and other innovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

WORKSHOPS: PAW NYC also features five full-day pre- and post-conference workshops that
complement the core conference program. Workshop agendas include advanced predictive modeling
methods, hands-on training, an intro to R (the open source analytics system), and enterprise decision
management.

For more see http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/newyork/2011/

PAW LONDON 2011

PAW London’s agenda covers hot topics and advanced methods such as risk management, uplift
(incremental lift) modeling, open source analytics, and crowdsourcing data mining. Case study
presentations cover campaign targeting, churn modeling, next-best-offer, selecting marketing channels,
global analytics deployment, email marketing, HR candidate search, and other innovative applications
that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

Join PAW and access the best keynotes, sessions, workshops, exposition, expert panel, live demos,
networking coffee breaks, reception, birds-of-a-feather lunches, brand-name enterprise leaders, and

industry heavyweights in the business.

For more see http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/london

CROSS-INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS

Predictive Analytics World is the only conference of its kind, delivering vendor-neutral sessions across
verticals such as banking, financial services, e-commerce, education, government, healthcare, high
technology, insurance, non-profits, publishing, social gaming, retail and telecommunications

And PAW covers the gamut of commercial applications of predictive analytics, including response
modeling, customer retention with churn modeling, product recommendations, fraud detection, online
marketing optimization, human resource decision-making, law enforcement, sales forecasting, and
credit scoring.

Why bring together such a wide range of endeavors? No matter how you use predictive analytics, the
story is the same: Predicatively scoring customers optimizes business performance. Predictive analytics
initiatives across industries leverage the same core predictive modeling technology, share similar project
overhead and data requirements, and face common process challenges and analytical hurdles.

RAVE REVIEWS:

“Hands down, best applied, analytics conference I have ever attended. Great exposure to cutting-edge
predictive techniques and I was able to turn around and apply some of those learnings to my work
immediately. I’ve never been able to say that after any conference I’ve attended before!”

Jon Francis
Senior Statistician
T-Mobile

Read more: Articles and blog entries about PAW can be found at http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/
pressroom.php

VENDORS. Meet the vendors and learn about their solutions, software and service. Discover the best
predictive analytics vendors available to serve your needs – learn what they do and see how they
compare

COLLEAGUES. Mingle, network and hang out with your best and brightest colleagues. Exchange
experiences over lunch, coffee breaks and the conference reception connecting with those professionals
who face the same challenges as you.

GET STARTED. If you’re new to predictive analytics, kicking off a new initiative, or exploring new ways
to position it at your organization, there’s no better place to get your bearings than Predictive Analytics
World. See what other companies are doing, witness vendor demos, participate in discussions with the
experts, network with your colleagues and weigh your options!

For more information:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com

View videos of PAW Washington DC, Oct 2010 — now available on-demand:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/online-video.php

What is predictive analytics? See the Predictive Analytics Guide:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/predictive_analytics.php

If you’d like our informative event updates, sign up at:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/signup-us.php

To sign up for the PAW group on LinkedIn, see:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/1005097

For inquiries e-mail regsupport@risingmedia.com or call (717) 798-3495.

Interview David Katz ,Dataspora /David Katz Consulting

Here is an interview with David Katz ,founder of David Katz Consulting (http://www.davidkatzconsulting.com/) and an analyst at the noted firm http://dataspora.com/. He is a featured speaker at Predictive Analytics World  http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2011/speakers.php#katz)

Ajay-  Describe your background working with analytics . How can we make analytics and science more attractive career options for young students

David- I had an interest in math from an early age, spurred by reading lots of science fiction with mathematicians and scientists in leading roles. I was fortunate to be at Harry and David (Fruit of the Month Club) when they were in the forefront of applying multivariate statistics to the challenge of targeting catalogs and other snail-mail offerings. Later I had the opportunity to expand these techniques to the retail sphere with Williams-Sonoma, who grew their retail business with the support of their catalog mailings. Since they had several catalog titles and product lines, cross-selling presented additional analytic challenges, and with the growth of the internet there was still another channel to consider, with its own dynamics.

After helping to found Abacus Direct Marketing, I became an independent consultant, which provided a lot of variety in applying statistics and data mining in a variety of settings from health care to telecom to credit marketing and education.

Students should be exposed to the many roles that analytics plays in modern life, and to the excitement of finding meaningful and useful patterns in the vast profusion of data that is now available.

Ajay-  Describe your most challenging project in 3 decades of experience in this field.

David- Hard to choose just one, but the educational field has been particularly interesting. Partnering with Olympic Behavior Labs, we’ve developed systems to help identify students who are most at-risk for dropping out of school to help target interventions that could prevent dropout and promote success.

Ajay- What do you think are the top 5 trends in analytics for 2011.

David- Big Data, Privacy concerns, quick response to consumer needs, integration of testing and analysis into business processes, social networking data.

Ajay- Do you think techniques like RFM and LTV are adequately utilized by organization. How can they be propagated further.

David- Organizations vary amazingly in how sophisticated or unsophisticated the are in analytics. A key factor in success as a consultant is to understand where each client is on this continuum and how well that serves their needs.

Ajay- What are the various software you have worked for in this field- and name your favorite per category.

David- I started out using COBOL (that dates me!) then concentrated on SAS for many years. More recently R is my favorite because of its coverage, currency and programming model, and it’s debugging capabilities.

Ajay- Independent consulting can be a strenuous job. What do you do to unwind?

David- Cycling, yoga, meditation, hiking and guitar.

Biography-

David Katz, Senior Analyst, Dataspora, and President, David Katz Consulting.

David Katz has been in the forefront of applying statistical models and database technology to marketing problems since 1980. He holds a Master’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of the founders of Abacus Direct Marketing and was previously the Director of Database Development for Williams-Sonoma.

He is the founder and President of David Katz Consulting, specializing in sophisticated statistical services for a variety of applications, with a special focus on the Direct Marketing Industry. David Katz has an extensive background that includes experience in all aspects of direct marketing from data mining, to strategy, to test design and implementation. In addition, he consults on a variety of data mining and statistical applications from public health to collections analysis. He has partnered with consulting firms such as Ernst and Young, Prediction Impact, and most recently on this project with Dataspora.

For more on David’s Session in Predictive Analytics World, San Fransisco on (http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2011/agenda.php#day2-16a)

Room: Salon 5 & 6
4:45pm – 5:05pm

Track 2: Social Data and Telecom 
Case Study: Major North American Telecom
Social Networking Data for Churn Analysis

A North American Telecom found that it had a window into social contacts – who has been calling whom on its network. This data proved to be predictive of churn. Using SQL, and GAM in R, we explored how to use this data to improve the identification of likely churners. We will present many dimensions of the lessons learned on this engagement.

Speaker: David Katz, Senior Analyst, Dataspora, and President, David Katz Consulting

Exhibit Hours
Monday, March 14th:10:00am to 7:30pm

Tuesday, March 15th:9:45am to 4:30pm

Common Analytical Tasks

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Some common analytical tasks from the diary of the glamorous life of a business analyst-

1) removing duplicates from a dataset based on certain key values/variables
2) merging two datasets based on a common key/variable/s
3) creating a subset based on a conditional value of a variable
4) creating a subset based on a conditional value of a time-date variable
5) changing format from one date time variable to another
6) doing a means grouped or classified at a level of aggregation
7) creating a new variable based on if then condition
8) creating a macro to run same program with different parameters
9) creating a logistic regression model, scoring dataset,
10) transforming variables
11) checking roc curves of model
12) splitting a dataset for a random sample (repeatable with random seed)
13) creating a cross tab of all variables in a dataset with one response variable
14) creating bins or ranks from a certain variable value
15) graphically examine cross tabs
16) histograms
17) plot(density())
18)creating a pie chart
19) creating a line graph, creating a bar graph
20) creating a bubbles chart
21) running a goal seek kind of simulation/optimization
22) creating a tabular report for multiple metrics grouped for one time/variable
23) creating a basic time series forecast

and some case studies I could think of-

 

As the Director, Analytics you have to examine current marketing efficiency as well as help optimize sales force efficiency across various channels. In addition you have to examine multiple sales channels including inbound telephone, outgoing direct mail, internet email campaigns. The datawarehouse is an RDBMS but it has multiple data quality issues to be checked for. In addition you need to submit your budget estimates for next year’s annual marketing budget to maximize sales return on investment.

As the Director, Risk you have to examine the overdue mortgages book that your predecessor left you. You need to optimize collections and minimize fraud and write-offs, and your efforts would be measured in maximizing profits from your department.

As a social media consultant you have been asked to maximize social media analytics and social media exposure to your client. You need to create a mechanism to report particular brand keywords, as well as automated triggers between unusual web activity, and statistical analysis of the website analytics metrics. Above all it needs to be set up in an automated reporting dashboard .

As a consultant to a telecommunication company you are asked to monitor churn and review the existing churn models. Also you need to maximize advertising spend on various channels. The problem is there are a large number of promotions always going on, some of the data is either incorrectly coded or there are interaction effects between the various promotions.

As a modeller you need to do the following-
1) Check ROC and H-L curves for existing model
2) Divide dataset in random splits of 40:60
3) Create multiple aggregated variables from the basic variables

4) run regression again and again
5) evaluate statistical robustness and fit of model
6) display results graphically
All these steps can be broken down in little little pieces of code- something which i am putting down a list of.
Are there any common data analysis tasks that you think I am missing out- any common case studies ? let me know.

 

 

 

Predictive Analytics World March2011 SF

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Message from PAWCON-

 

Predictive Analytics World, Mar 14-15 2011, San Francisco, CA

More info: pawcon.com/sanfrancisco

Agenda at-a-glance: pawcon.com/sanfrancisco/2011/agenda_overview.php

PAW’s San Francisco 2011 program is the richest and most diverse yet, including over 30 sessions across two tracks – an “All Audiences” and an “Expert/Practitioner” track — so you can witness how predictive analytics is applied at Bank of America, Bank of the West, Best Buy, CA State Automobile Association, Cerebellum Capital, Chessmetrics, Fidelity, Gaia Interactive, GE Capital, Google, HealthMedia, Hewlett Packard, ICICI Bank (India), MetLife, Monster.com, Orbitz, PayPal/eBay, Richmond, VA Police Dept, U. of Melbourne, Yahoo!, YMCA, and a major N. American telecom, plus insights from projects for Anheiser-Busch, the SSA, and Netflix.

PAW’s agenda covers hot topics and advanced methods such as uplift modeling (net lift), ensemble models, social data (6 sessions on this), search marketing, crowdsourcing, blackbox trading, fraud detection, risk management, survey analysis, and other innovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

Predictive Analytics World is the only conference of its kind, delivering vendor-neutral sessions across verticals such as banking, financial services, e-commerce, education, government, healthcare, high technology, insurance, non-profits, publishing, social gaming, retail and telecommunications

And PAW covers the gamut of commercial applications of predictive analytics, including response modeling, customer retention with churn modeling, product recommendations, fraud detection, online marketing optimization, human resource decision-making, law enforcement, sales forecasting, and credit scoring.

WORKSHOPS. PAW also features pre- and post-conference workshops that complement the core conference program. Workshop agendas include advanced predictive modeling methods, hands-on training and enterprise decision management.

More info: pawcon.com/sanfrancisco

Agenda at-a-glance: pawcon.com/sanfrancisco/2011/agenda_overview.php

Be sure to register by Dec 7 for the Super Early Bird rate (save $400):
pawcon.com/sanfrancisco/register.php

If you’d like our informative event updates, sign up at:
pawcon.com/signup-us.php

More PAWS

Dr Eric Siegel  (interviewed here at https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/interview_eric-siege/ )

continues his series of excellent analytical conferences-

Oct 19-20 – WASHINGTON DC: PAW Conference & Workshops (pawcon.com/dc)

Oct 28-29 – SAN FRANCISCO: Workshop (businessprediction.com)

Nov 15-16 – LONDON: PAW Conference & Workshop (pawcon.com/london)

March 14-15, 2011 – SAN FRANCISCO: PAW Conference & Workshops

* Register by Sep 30 for PAW London Early-Bird – Save £200
http://pawcon.com/london/register.php

* For the Oct 28-29 workshop, see http://businessprediction.com

———————–

INFORMATION ABOUT THE PAW CONFERENCES:

Predictive Analytics World ( http://pawcon.com ) is the business-focused event for predictive analytics professionals, managers and commercial practitioners, covering today’s commercial deployment of predictive analytics, across industries and across software vendors.

PAW delivers the best case studies, expertise, keynotes, sessions, workshops, exposition, expert panel, live demos, networking coffee breaks, reception, birds-of-a-feather lunches, brand-name enterprise leaders, and industry heavyweights in the business.

Case study presentations cover campaign targeting, churn modeling, next-best-offer, selecting marketing channels, global analytics deployment, email marketing, HR candidate search, and other innovative applications. The Conference agendas cover hot topics such as social data, text mining, search marketing, risk management, uplift (incremental lift) modeling, survey analysis, consumer privacy, sales force optimization and other innovative applications that benefit organizations in new and creative ways.

PAW delivers two rich conference programs in Oct./Nov. with very little content overlap featuring a wealth of speakers with front-line experience. See which one is best for you:

PAW’s DC 2010 (Oct 19-20) program includes over 25 sessions across two tracks – an “All Audiences” and an “Expert/Practitioner” track — so you can witness how predictive analytics is applied at 1-800-FLOWERS, CIBC, Corporate Executive Board, Forrester, LifeLine, Macy’s, MetLife, Miles Kimball, Monster, Paychex, PayPal (eBay), SunTrust, Target, UPMC Health Plan, Xerox, YMCA, and Yahoo!, plus special examples from the U.S. government agencies DoD, DHS, and SSA.

Sign up for event updates in the US http://pawcon.com/signup-us.php
View the agenda at-a-glance: http://pawcon.com/dc/2010/agenda_overview.php
For more: http://pawcon.com/dc
Register: http://pawcon.com/dc/register.php

PAW London 2010 (Nov 15-16) will feature over 20 speakers from 10 countries with case studies from leading enterprises in e-commerce, finance, healthcare, retail, and telecom such as Canadian Automobile Association, Chessmetrics, e-Dialog, Hamburger Sparkasse, Jeevansathi.com (India’s 2nd-largest matrimony portal), Life Line Screening, Lloyds TSB, Naukri.com (India’s number 1 job portal), Overtoom, SABMiller, Univ. of Melbourne, and US Bank, plus special examples from Anheuser-Busch, Disney, HP, HSBC, Pfizer, U.S. SSA, WestWind Foundation and others.

Sign up for event updates in the UK http://pawcon.com/signup-uk.php
View the agenda at-a-glance: http://pawcon.com/london/2010/agenda_overview.php
For more: http://pawcon.com/london
Register: http://pawcon.com/london/register.php

——————————-

PAW San Francisco Save-the-Date and Call-for-Speakers:

March 14-15, 2011
San Francisco Marriott Marquis
San Francisco, CA

PAW call-for-speakers information and submission form: (Due Oct 8)
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/submit.php

If you wish to receive periodic call-for-speakers notifications regarding Predictive Analytics World, email chair@predictiveanalyticsworld.com with the subject line “call-for-speakers notifications”.

Predictive Analytics World
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com
Washington DC – London – San Francisco

KDNuggets Poll on SAS: Churn in Analytics Users

Here are the some surprising results from the Bible of all Data Miners , KDNuggets.com with some interesting comments about SAS being the Microsoft of analytics.

I believe technically advanced users will probably want to try out R before going in for a commercial license from Revolution Analytics as it is free to try out. Also WPS offers a one month free preview for its software- the latest release of it competes with SAS/Stat and SAS/Access, SAS/Graph and Base SAS- so anyone having these installations on a server would be interested to atleast test it for free. Also WPS would be interested in increasing engines (like they have for Oracle and Teradata).

One very crucial difference for SAS is it’s ability to pull in data from almost all data formats- so if you are using SAS/Connect to remote submit code- then you may not be able to switch soon.

Also the more license heavy customers are not the kind of cutomers who have lots of data in their local desktops but is usually pulled and then crunched before analysed. R has recently made some strides with the RevoScaler package from Revolution Analytics but it’s effectiveness would be tested and tried in the coming months- it seems like a great step in the right direction.

For SAS, the feedback should be a call to improve their product bundling – some of which can feel like over selling at times- but they have been fighting off challenges since past 4 decades and have the pockets and intention to sustain market share battles including discounts ( for repeat customers SAS can be much cheaper than say a first time user of WPS or R)

http://teamwpc.co.uk/home

This really should come as a surprise to some people. You can see the comments on WPS and R at the site itself. Interesting stufff and we can see after say 1 year to see how many actually DID switch.

http://www.kdnuggets.com/polls/2010/switching-from-sas-to-wps.html

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