Tag: competitions

Interview Dan Steinberg Founder Salford Systems

Here is an interview with Dan Steinberg, Founder and President of Salford Systems (http://www.salford-systems.com/ )

Ajay- Describe your journey from academia to technology entrepreneurship. What are the key milestones or turning points that you remember.

 Dan- When I was in graduate school studying econometrics at Harvard,  a number of distinguished professors at Harvard (and MIT) were actively involved in substantial real world activities.  Professors that I interacted with, or studied with, or whose software I used became involved in the creation of such companies as Sun Microsystems, Data Resources, Inc. or were heavily involved in business consulting through their own companies or other influential consultants.  Some not involved in private sector consulting took on substantial roles in government such as membership on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. The atmosphere was one that encouraged free movement between academia and the private sector so the idea of forming a consulting and software company was quite natural and did not seem in any way inconsistent with being devoted to the advancement of science.

 Ajay- What are the latest products by Salford Systems? Any future product plans or modification to work on Big Data analytics, mobile computing and cloud computing.

 Dan- Our central set of data mining technologies are CART, MARS, TreeNet, RandomForests, and PRIM, and we have always maintained feature rich logistic regression and linear regression modules. In our latest release scheduled for January 2012 we will be including a new data mining approach to linear and logistic regression allowing for the rapid processing of massive numbers of predictors (e.g., one million columns), with powerful predictor selection and coefficient shrinkage. The new methods allow not only classic techniques such as ridge and lasso regression, but also sub-lasso model sizes. Clear tradeoff diagrams between model complexity (number of predictors) and predictive accuracy allow the modeler to select an ideal balance suitable for their requirements.

The new version of our data mining suite, Salford Predictive Modeler (SPM), also includes two important extensions to the boosted tree technology at the heart of TreeNet.  The first, Importance Sampled learning Ensembles (ISLE), is used for the compression of TreeNet tree ensembles. Starting with, say, a 1,000 tree ensemble, the ISLE compression might well reduce this down to 200 reweighted trees. Such compression will be valuable when models need to be executed in real time. The compression rate is always under the modeler’s control, meaning that if a deployed model may only contain, say, 30 trees, then the compression will deliver an optimal 30-tree weighted ensemble. Needless to say, compression of tree ensembles should be expected to be lossy and how much accuracy is lost when extreme compression is desired will vary from case to case. Prior to ISLE, practitioners have simply truncated the ensemble to the maximum allowable size.  The new methodology will substantially outperform truncation.

The second major advance is RULEFIT, a rule extraction engine that starts with a TreeNet model and decomposes it into the most interesting and predictive rules. RULEFIT is also a tree ensemble post-processor and offers the possibility of improving on the original TreeNet predictive performance. One can think of the rule extraction as an alternative way to explain and interpret an otherwise complex multi-tree model. The rules extracted are similar conceptually to the terminal nodes of a CART tree but the various rules will not refer to mutually exclusive regions of the data.

 Ajay- You have led teams that have won multiple data mining competitions. What are some of your favorite techniques or approaches to a data mining problem.

 Dan- We only enter competitions involving problems for which our technology is suitable, generally, classification and regression. In these areas, we are  partial to TreeNet because it is such a capable and robust learning machine. However, we always find great value in analyzing many aspects of a data set with CART, especially when we require a compact and easy to understand story about the data. CART is exceptionally well suited to the discovery of errors in data, often revealing errors created by the competition organizers themselves. More than once, our reports of data problems have been responsible for the competition organizer’s decision to issue a corrected version of the data and we have been the only group to discover the problem.

In general, tackling a data mining competition is no different than tackling any analytical challenge. You must start with a solid conceptual grasp of the problem and the actual objectives, and the nature and limitations of the data. Following that comes feature extraction, the selection of a modeling strategy (or strategies), and then extensive experimentation to learn what works best.

 Ajay- I know you have created your own software. But are there other software that you use or liked to use?

 Dan- For analytics we frequently test open source software to make sure that our tools will in fact deliver the superior performance we advertise. In general, if a problem clearly requires technology other than that offered by Salford, we advise clients to seek other consultants expert in that other technology.

 Ajay- Your software is installed at 3500 sites including 400 universities as per http://www.salford-systems.com/company/aboutus/index.html What is the key to managing and keeping so many customers happy?

 Dan- First, we have taken great pains to make our software reliable and we make every effort  to avoid problems related to bugs.  Our testing procedures are extensive and we have experts dedicated to stress-testing software . Second, our interface is designed to be natural, intuitive, and easy to use, so the challenges to the new user are minimized. Also, clear documentation, help files, and training videos round out how we allow the user to look after themselves. Should a client need to contact us we try to achieve 24-hour turn around on tech support issues and monitor all tech support activity to ensure timeliness, accuracy, and helpfulness of our responses. WebEx/GotoMeeting and other internet based contact permit real time interaction.

 Ajay- What do you do to relax and unwind?

 Dan- I am in the gym almost every day combining weight and cardio training. No matter how tired I am before the workout I always come out energized so locating a good gym during my extensive travels is a must. I am also actively learning Portuguese so I look to watch a Brazilian TV show or Portuguese dubbed movie when I have time; I almost never watch any form of video unless it is available in Portuguese.

 Biography-

http://www.salford-systems.com/blog/dan-steinberg.html

Dan Steinberg, President and Founder of Salford Systems, is a well-respected member of the statistics and econometrics communities. In 1992, he developed the first PC-based implementation of the original CART procedure, working in concert with Leo Breiman, Richard Olshen, Charles Stone and Jerome Friedman. In addition, he has provided consulting services on a number of biomedical and market research projects, which have sparked further innovations in the CART program and methodology.

Dr. Steinberg received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, and has given full day presentations on data mining for the American Marketing Association, the Direct Marketing Association and the American Statistical Association. After earning a PhD in Econometrics at Harvard Steinberg began his professional career as a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, and then as Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. A book he co-authored on Classification and Regression Trees was awarded the 1999 Nikkei Quality Control Literature Prize in Japan for excellence in statistical literature promoting the improvement of industrial quality control and management.

His consulting experience at Salford Systems has included complex modeling projects for major banks worldwide, including Citibank, Chase, American Express, Credit Suisse, and has included projects in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Korea, Japan and Brazil. Steinberg led the teams that won first place awards in the KDDCup 2000, and the 2002 Duke/TeraData Churn modeling competition, and the teams that won awards in the PAKDD competitions of 2006 and 2007. He has published papers in economics, econometrics, computer science journals, and contributes actively to the ongoing research and development at Salford.

Heritage prize= 3mill now open

I am still angry with THE netflix for 1 mill I lost out. No sweat! this time the money is 3 times as much, it is legit, and yes baby you can change the world, make it a better place and get rich.! see details below-http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/c/hhp/Data

HERITAGE HEALTH PRIZE DATA FILES

You must accept this competition’s rules before you’ll be able to download data files.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The information provided below is intended only to provide general guidance to participants in the Heritage Health Prize Competition and is subject to the Competition Official Rules. Any capitalized term not defined below is defined in the Competition Official Rules. Please consult the Competition Official Rules for complete details.

Heritage Provider Network is providing Competition Entrants with deidentified member data collected during a forty-eight month period that is allocated among three data sets (the “Data Sets”). Competition Entrants will use the Data Sets to develop and test their algorithms for accurately predicting the number of days that the members will spend in a hospital (inpatient or emergency room visit) during the 12-month period following the Data Set cut-off date.

HHP_release2.zip contains the latest files, so you can ignore HHP_release1.zip. SampleEntry.CSV shows you how an entry should look.

Data Sets will be released to Entrants after registration on the Website according to the following schedule:

April 4, 2011 Claims Table – Y1 and DaysInHospital Table – Y2

May 4, 2011

 All other Data Sets except Labs Table and Rx Table

From https://www.kaggle.com/

The $3 million Heritage Health Prize opens to entries

It’s been one month since the launch of the Heritage Health Prize. The prize has attracted some great publicity, receiving coverage from the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Slate andForbes.

By now, people have had a good chance to poke around the first portion of the data. Now the fun starts! HPN have released two more years’-worth of data, set the accuracy threshold and are opening up the competition to entries. The data are available from the Heritage Health Prize page. Good luck to all participants!

The Deloitte/FIDE Chess Ratings Competition results

The Deloitte/FIDE Chess Ratings Competition attracted one of the strongest fields ever seen in a Kaggle Competition. The competition attracted 189 teams, ranging from chess ratings  experts to Netflix Prize winners. As Jeff Sonas wrote on the Kaggle blog last week, the  competition has far exceeded his expectations. A big congratulations the provisional winner, Tim Salimans, an econometrician at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. We look forward to reading about the approaches used by top performers on the Kaggle blog. We also look forward to the results of the FIDE prize, which could see the introduction of a new chess ratings system.

ICDAR 2011 Competition Results

The ICDAR 2011 competition also finished recently. The competiiton required participants to develop an algorithm that correctly matched handwriting samples. The winners were Lewis Griffin and Andrew Newell from the University College London who achieved Kaggle’s first ever perfect score by managing to match every sample correctly! Andrew and Lewis have posted a description of their winning method on the Kaggle blog.

Revolution R Enterprise

Since R is the most popular language used by Kaggle members, the Revolution Analytics team is making Revolution R Enterprise (the pre-eminent commercial version of R) available free of charge to Kaggle members. Revolution R Enterprise has several advantages over standard R, including the ability to seemlessly handle larger datasets. To get your free copy, visit http://info.revolutionanalytics.com/Kaggle.html.
Kaggle-in-Class

As many of you know, Kaggle offers a free platform, Kaggle-in-Class, for instructors who want to host competitions for their students. For those interested in hearing more about the use of Kaggle-in-Class as a teaching tool, Susan Holmes and Nelson Ray from Stanford University share their experience in a webinar organized by the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education.

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Google creates a Code Jam

So you think you can code- here is a contest for All – programmers AND students AND professionals

Check the enthralling competition yourself at https://code.google.com/codejam

Interview Luis Torgo Author Data Mining with R

Example of k-nearest neighbour classification
Image via Wikipedia

Here is an interview with Prof Luis Torgo, author of the recent best seller “Data Mining with R-learning with case studies”.

Ajay- Describe your career in science. How do you think can more young people be made interested in science.

Luis- My interest in science only started after I’ve finished my degree. I’ve entered a research lab at the University of Porto and started working on Machine Learning, around 1990. Since then I’ve been involved generally in data analysis topics both from a research perspective as well as from a more applied point of view through interactions with industry partners on several projects. I’ve spent most of my career at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto, but since 2008 I’m at the department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Sciences of the same university. At the same time I’ve been a researcher at LIAAD / Inesc Porto LA (www.liaad.up.pt).

I like a lot what I do and like science and the “scientific way of thinking”, but I cannot say that I’ve always thought of this area as my “place”. Most of all I like solving challenging problems through data analysis. If that translates into some scientific outcome than I’m more satisfied but that is not my main goal, though I’m kind of “forced” to think about that because of the constraints of an academic career.

That does not mean I’m not passionate about science, I just think there are many more ways of “doing science” than what is reflected in the usual “scientific indicators” that most institutions seem to be more and more obsessed about.

Regards interesting young people in science that is a hard question that I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer. I do tend to think that young people are more sensible to concrete examples of problems they think are interesting and that science helps in solving, as a way of finding a motivation for facing the hard work they will encounter in a scientific career. I do believe in case studies as a nice way to learn and motivate, and thus my book 😉

Ajay- Describe your new book “Data Mining with R, learning with case studies” Why did you choose a case study based approach? who is the target audience? What is your favorite case study from the book

Luis- This book is about learning how to use R for data mining. The book follows a “learn by doing it” approach to data mining instead of the more common theoretical description of the available techniques in this discipline. This is accomplished by presenting a series of illustrative case studies for which all necessary steps, code and data are provided to the reader. Moreover, the book has an associated web page (www.liaad.up.pt/~ltorgo/DataMiningWithR) where all code inside the book is given so that easy copy-paste is possible for the more lazy readers.

The language used in the book is very informal without many theoretical details on the used data mining techniques. For obtaining these theoretical insights there are already many good data mining books some of which are referred in “further readings” sections given throughout the book. The decision of following this writing style had to do with the intended target audience of the book.

In effect, the objective was to write a monograph that could be used as a supplemental book for practical classes on data mining that exist in several courses, but at the same time that could be attractive to professionals working on data mining in non-academic environments, and thus the choice of this more practically oriented approach.

Regards my favorite case study that is a hard question for an author… still I would probably choose the “Predicting Stock Market Returns” case study (Chapter 3). Not only because I like this challenging problem, but mainly because the case study addresses all aspects of knowledge discovery in a real world scenario and not only the construction of predictive models. It tackles data collection, data pre-processing, model construction, transforming predictions into actions using different trading policies, using business-related performance metrics, implementing a trading simulator for “real-world” evaluation, and laying out grounds for constructing an online trading system.

Obviously, for all these steps there are far too many options to be possible to describe/evaluate all of them in a chapter, still I do believe that for the reader it is important to see the overall picture, and read about the relevant questions on this problem and some possible paths that can be followed at these different steps.

In other words: do not expect to become rich with the solution I describe in the chapter !

Ajay- Apart from R, what other data mining software do you use or have used in the past. How would you compare their advantages and disadvantages with R

Luis- I’ve played around with Clementine, Weka, RapidMiner and Knime, but really only playing with teaching goals, and no serious use/evaluation in the context of data mining projects. For the latter I mainly use R or software developed by myself (either in R or other languages). In this context, I do not think it is fair to compare R with these or other tools as I lack serious experience with them. I can however, tell you about what I see as the main pros and cons of R. The main reason for using R is really not only the power of the tool that does not stop surprising me in terms of what already exists and keeps appearing as contributions of an ever growing community, but mainly the ability of rapidly transforming ideas into prototypes. Regards some of its drawbacks I would probably mention the lack of efficiency when compared to other alternatives and the problem of data set sizes being limited by main memory.

I know that there are several efforts around for solving this latter issue not only from the community (e.g. http://cran.at.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html), but also from the industry (e.g. Revolution Analytics), but I would prefer that at this stage this would be a standard feature of the language so the the “normal” user need not worry about it. But then this is a community effort and if I’m not happy with the current status instead of complaining I should do something about it!

Ajay- Describe your writing habit- How do you set about writing the book- did you write a fixed amount daily or do you write in bursts etc

Luis- Unfortunately, I write in bursts whenever I find some time for it. This is much more tiring and time consuming as I need to read back material far too often, but I cannot afford dedicating too much consecutive time to a single task. Actually, I frequently tease my PhD students when they “complain” about the lack of time for doing what they have to, that they should learn to appreciate the luxury of having a single task to complete because it will probably be the last time in their professional life!

Ajay- What do you do to relax or unwind when not working?

Luis- For me, the best way to relax from work is by playing sports. When I’m involved in some game I reset my mind and forget about all other things and this is very relaxing for me. A part from sports I enjoy a lot spending time with my family and friends. A good and long dinner with friends over a good bottle of wine can do miracles when I’m too stressed with work! Finally,I do love traveling around with my family.

Luis Torgo

Short Bio: Luis Torgo has a degree in Systems and Informatics Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science. He is an Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto. He is also a researcher of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Data Analysis (LIAAD) belonging to INESC Porto LA. Luis Torgo has been an active researcher in Machine Learning and Data Mining for more than 20 years. He has lead several academic and industrial Data Mining research projects. Luis Torgo accompanies the R project almost since its beginning, using it on his research activities. He teaches R at different levels and has given several courses in different countries.

For reading “Data Mining with R” – you can visit this site, also to avail of a 20% discount the publishers have generously given (message below)-

For more information and to place an order, visit us at http://www.crcpress.com.  Order online and apply 20% Off discount code 907HM at checkout.  CRC is pleased to offer free standard shipping on all online orders!

link to the book page  http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781439810187

Price: $79.95
Cat. #: K10510
ISBN: 9781439810187
ISBN 10: 1439810184
Publication Date: November 09, 2010
Number of Pages: 305
Availability: In Stock
Binding(s): Hardback 

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PAWCON -This week in London

Watch out for the twitter hash news on PAWCON and the exciting agenda lined up. If your in the City- you may want to just drop in

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/london/2010/agenda.php#day1-7

Disclaimer- PAWCON has been a blog partner with Decisionstats (since the first PAWCON ). It is vendor neutral and features open source as well proprietary software, as well case studies from academia and Industry for a balanced view.

 

Little birdie told me some exciting product enhancements may be in the works including a not yet announced R plugin 😉 and the latest SAS product using embedded analytics and Dr Elder’s full day data mining workshop.

Citation-

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/london/2010/agenda.php#day1-7

Monday November 15, 2010
All conference sessions take place in Edward 5-7

8:00am-9:00am

Registration, Coffee and Danish
Room: Albert Suites

9:00am-9:50am

Keynote
Five Ways Predictive Analytics Cuts Enterprise Risk

All business is an exercise in risk management. All organizations would benefit from measuring, tracking and computing risk as a core process, much like insurance companies do.

Predictive analytics does the trick, one customer at a time. This technology is a data-driven means to compute the risk each customer will defect, not respond to an expensive mailer, consume a retention discount even if she were not going to leave in the first place, not be targeted for a telephone solicitation that would have landed a sale, commit fraud, or become a “loss customer” such as a bad debtor or an insurance policy-holder with high claims.

In this keynote session, Dr. Eric Siegel will reveal:

  • Five ways predictive analytics evolves your enterprise to reduce risk
  • Hidden sources of risk across operational functions
  • What every business should learn from insurance companies
  • How advancements have reversed the very meaning of fraud
  • Why “man + machine” teams are greater than the sum of their parts for

    • enterprise decision support

 

Speaker: Eric Siegel, Ph.D., Program Chair, Predictive Analytics World

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

IBM9:50am-10:10am

Platinum Sponsor Presentation
The Analytical Revolution

The algorithms at the heart of predictive analytics have been around for years – in some cases for decades. But now, as we see predictive analytics move to the mainstream and become a competitive necessity for organisations in all industries, the most crucial challenges are to ensure that results can be delivered to where they can make a direct impact on outcomes and business performance, and that the application of analytics can be scaled to the most demanding enterprise requirements.

This session will look at the obstacles to successfully applying analysis at the enterprise level, and how today’s approaches and technologies can enable the true “industrialisation” of predictive analytics.

Speaker: Colin Shearer, WW Industry Solutions Leader, IBM UK Ltd

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

Deloitte10:10am-10:20am

Gold Sponsor Presentation
How Predictive Analytics is Driving Business Value

Organisations are increasingly relying on analytics to make key business decisions. Today, technology advances and the increasing need to realise competitive advantage in the market place are driving predictive analytics from the domain of marketers and tactical one-off exercises to the point where analytics are being embedded within core business processes.

During this session, Richard will share some of the focus areas where Deloitte is driving business transformation through predictive analytics, including Workforce, Brand Equity and Reputational Risk, Customer Insight and Network Analytics.

Speaker: Richard Fayers, Senior Manager, Deloitte Analytical Insight

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

10:20am-10:45am

Break / Exhibits
Room: Albert Suites

10:45am-11:35am
Healthcare
Case Study: Life Line Screening
Taking CRM Global Through Predictive Analytics

While Life Line is successfully executing a US CRM roadmap, they are also beginning this same evolution abroad. They are beginning in the UK where Merkle procured data and built a response model that is pulling responses over 30% higher than competitors. This presentation will give an overview of the US CRM roadmap, and then focus on the beginning of their strategy abroad, focusing on the data procurement they could not get anywhere else but through Merkle and the successful modeling and analytics for the UK.

Speaker: Ozgur Dogan, VP, Quantitative Solutions Group, Merkle Inc.

Speaker: Trish Mathe, Life Line Screening

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

11:35am-12:25pm
Open Source Analytics; Healthcare
Case Study: A large health care organization
The Rise of Open Source Analytics: Lowering Costs While Improving Patient Care

Rapidminer and R were the number 1 and 2 in this years annual KDNuggets data mining tool usage poll, followed by Knime on place 4 and Weka on place 6. So what’s going on here? Are these open source tools really that good or is their popularity strongly correlated with lower acquisition costs alone? This session answers these questions based on a real world case for a large health care organization and explains the risks & benefits of using open source technology. The final part of the session explains how these tools stack up against their traditional, proprietary counterparts.

Speaker: Jos van Dongen, Associate & Principal, DeltIQ Group

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

12:25pm-1:25pm

Lunch / Exhibits
Room: Albert Suites

1:25pm-2:15pm
Keynote
Thought Leader:
Case Study: Yahoo! and other large on-line e-businesses
Search Marketing and Predictive Analytics: SEM, SEO and On-line Marketing Case Studies

Search Engine Marketing is a $15B industry in the U.S. growing to double that number over the next 3 years. Worldwide the SEM market was over $50B in 2010. Not only is this a fast growing area of marketing, but it is one that has significant implications for brand and direct marketing and is undergoing rapid change with emerging channels such as mobile and social. What is unique about this area of marketing is a singularly heavy dependence on analytics:

 

  • Large numbers of variables and options
  • Real-time auctions/bids and a need to adjust strategies in real-time
  • Difficult optimization problems on allocating spend across a huge number of keywords
  • Fast-changing competitive terrain and heavy competition on the obvious channels
  • Complicated interactions between various channels and a large choice of search keyword expansion possibilities
  • Profitability and ROI analysis that are complex and often challenging

 

The size of the industry, its growing importance in marketing, its upcoming role in Mobile Advertising, and its uniquely heavy reliance on analytics makes it particularly interesting as an area for predictive analytics applications. In this session, not only will hear about some of the latest strategies and techniques to optimize search, you will hear case studies that illustrate the important role of analytics from industry practitioners.

Speaker: Usama Fayyad, , Ph.D., CEO, Open Insights

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

SAS2:15pm-2:35pm

Platinum Sponsor Presentation
Creating a Model Factory Using in-Database Analytics

With the ever-increasing number of analytical models required to make fact-based decisions, as well as increasing audit compliance regulations, it is more important than ever that these models can be created, monitored, retuned and deployed as quickly and automatically as possible. This paper, using a case study from a major financial organisation, will show how organisations can build a model factory efficiently using the latest SAS technology that utilizes the power of in-database processing.

Speaker: John Spooner, Analytics Specialist, SAS (UK)

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

2:35pm-2:45pm

Session Break
Room: Albert Suites

2:45pm-3:35pm

Retail
Case Study: SABMiller
Predictive Analytics & Global Marketing Strategy

Over the last few years SABMiller plc, the second largest brewing company in the world operating in 70 countries, has been systematically segmenting its markets in different countries globally in order optimize their portfolio strategy & align it to their long term country specific growth strategy. This presentation talks about the overall methodology followed and the challenges that had to be overcome both from a technical as well as from a change management stand point in order to successfully implement a standard analytics approach to diverse markets and diverse business positions in a highly global setting.

The session explains how country specific growth strategies were converted to objective variables and consumption occasion segments were created that differentiated the market effectively by their growth potential. In addition to this the presentation will also provide a discussion on issues like:

  • The dilemmas of static vs. dynamic solutions and standardization vs. adaptable solutions
  • Challenges in acceptability, local capability development, overcoming implementation inertia, cost effectiveness, etc
  • The role that business partners at SAB and analytics service partners at AbsolutData together play in providing impactful and actionable solutions

 

Speaker: Anne Stephens, SABMiller plc

Speaker: Titir Pal, AbsolutData

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

3:35pm-4:25pm

Retail
Case Study: Overtoom Belgium
Increasing Marketing Relevance Through Personalized Targeting

 

Since many years, Overtoom Belgium – a leading B2B retailer and division of the French Manutan group – focuses on an extensive use of CRM. In this presentation, we demonstrate how Overtoom has integrated Predictive Analytics to optimize customer relationships. In this process, they employ analytics to develop answers to the key question: “which product should we offer to which customer via which channel”. We show how Overtoom gained a 10% revenue increase by replacing the existing segmentation scheme with accurate predictive response models. Additionally, we illustrate how Overtoom succeeds to deliver more relevant communications by offering personalized promotional content to every single customer, and how these personalized offers positively impact Overtoom’s conversion rates.

Speaker: Dr. Geert Verstraeten, Python Predictions

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

4:25pm-4:50pm

Break / Exhibits
Room: Albert Suites

4:50pm-5:40pm
Uplift Modelling:
Case Study: Lloyds TSB General Insurance & US Bank
Uplift Modelling: You Should Not Only Measure But Model Incremental Response

Most marketing analysts understand that measuring the impact of a marketing campaign requires a valid control group so that uplift (incremental response) can be reported. However, it is much less widely understood that the targeting models used almost everywhere do not attempt to optimize that incremental measure. That requires an uplift model.

This session will explain why a switch to uplift modelling is needed, illustrate what can and does go wrong when they are not used and the hugely positive impact they can have when used effectively. It will also discuss a range of approaches to building and assessing uplift models, from simple basic adjustments to existing modelling processes through to full-blown uplift modelling.

The talk will use Lloyds TSB General Insurance & US Bank as a case study and also illustrate real-world results from other companies and sectors.

 

Speaker: Nicholas Radcliffe, Founder and Director, Stochastic Solutions

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

5:40pm-6:30pm

Consumer services
Case Study: Canadian Automobile Association and other B2C examples
The Diminishing Marginal Returns of Variable Creation in Predictive Analytics Solutions

 

Variable Creation is the key to success in any predictive analytics exercise. Many different approaches are adopted during this process, yet there are diminishing marginal returns as the number of variables increase. Our organization conducted a case study on four existing clients to explore this so-called diminishing impact of variable creation on predictive analytics solutions. Existing predictive analytics solutions were built using our traditional variable creation process. Yet, presuming that we could exponentially increase the number of variables, we wanted to determine if this added significant benefit to the existing solution.

Speaker: Richard Boire, BoireFillerGroup

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

6:30pm-7:30pm

Reception / Exhibits
Room: Albert Suites

Tuesday November 16, 2010
All conference sessions take place in Edward 5-7

8:00am-9:00am

Registration, Coffee and Danish
Room: Albert Suites

9:00am-9:55am
Keynote
Multiple Case Studies: Anheuser-Busch, Disney, HP, HSBC, Pfizer, and others
The High ROI of Data Mining for Innovative Organizations

Data mining and advanced analytics can enhance your bottom line in three basic ways, by 1) streamlining a process, 2) eliminating the bad, or 3) highlighting the good. In rare situations, a fourth way – creating something new – is possible. But modern organizations are so effective at their core tasks that data mining usually results in an iterative, rather than transformative, improvement. Still, the impact can be dramatic.

Dr. Elder will share the story (problem, solution, and effect) of nine projects conducted over the last decade for some of America’s most innovative agencies and corporations:

    Streamline:

  • Cross-selling for HSBC
  • Image recognition for Anheuser-Busch
  • Biometric identification for Lumidigm (for Disney)
  • Optimal decisioning for Peregrine Systems (now part of Hewlett-Packard)
  • Quick decisions for the Social Security Administration
    Eliminate Bad:

  • Tax fraud detection for the IRS
  • Warranty Fraud detection for Hewlett-Packard
    Highlight Good:

  • Sector trading for WestWind Foundation
  • Drug efficacy discovery for Pharmacia & UpJohn (now Pfizer)

Moderator: Eric Siegel, Program Chair, Predictive Analytics World

Speaker: John Elder, Ph.D., Elder Research, Inc.

Also see Dr. Elder’s full-day workshop

 

[ Top of this page ] [ Agenda overview ]

9:55am-10:30am

Break / Exhibits
Room: Albert Suites

10:30am-11:20am
Telecommunications
Case Study: Leading Telecommunications Operator
Predictive Analytics and Efficient Fact-based Marketing

The presentation describes what are the major topics and issues when you introduce predictive analytics and how to build a Fact-Based marketing environment. The introduced tools and methodologies proved to be highly efficient in terms of improving the overall direct marketing activity and customer contact operations for the involved companies. Generally, the introduced approaches have great potential for organizations with large customer bases like Mobile Operators, Internet Giants, Media Companies, or Retail Chains.

Main Introduced Solutions:-Automated Serial Production of Predictive Models for Campaign Targeting-Automated Campaign Measurements and Tracking Solutions-Precise Product Added Value Evaluation.

Speaker: Tamer Keshi, Ph.D., Long-term contractor, T-Mobile

Speaker: Beata Kovacs, International Head of CRM Solutions, Deutsche Telekom

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11:20am-11:25am

Session Changeover

11:25am-12:15pm
Thought Leader
Nine Laws of Data Mining

Data mining is the predictive core of predictive analytics, a business process that finds useful patterns in data through the use of business knowledge. The industry standard CRISP-DM methodology describes the process, but does not explain why the process takes the form that it does. I present nine “laws of data mining”, useful maxims for data miners, with explanations that reveal the reasons behind the surface properties of the data mining process. The nine laws have implications for predictive analytics applications: how and why it works so well, which ambitions could succeed, and which must fail.

 

Speaker: Tom Khabaza, khabaza.com

 

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12:15pm-1:30pm

Lunch / Exhibits
Room: Albert Suites

1:30pm-2:25pm
Expert Panel: Kaboom! Predictive Analytics Hits the Mainstream

Predictive analytics has taken off, across industry sectors and across applications in marketing, fraud detection, credit scoring and beyond. Where exactly are we in the process of crossing the chasm toward pervasive deployment, and how can we ensure progress keeps up the pace and stays on target?

This expert panel will address:

  • How much of predictive analytics’ potential has been fully realized?
  • Where are the outstanding opportunities with greatest potential?
  • What are the greatest challenges faced by the industry in achieving wide scale adoption?
  • How are these challenges best overcome?

 

Panelist: John Elder, Ph.D., Elder Research, Inc.

Panelist: Colin Shearer, WW Industry Solutions Leader, IBM UK Ltd

Panelist: Udo Sglavo, Global Analytic Solutions Manager, SAS

Panel moderator: Eric Siegel, Ph.D., Program Chair, Predictive Analytics World

2:25pm-2:30pm

Session Changeover

2:30pm-3:20pm
Crowdsourcing Data Mining
Case Study: University of Melbourne, Chessmetrics
Prediction Competitions: Far More Than Just a Bit of Fun

Data modelling competitions allow companies and researchers to post a problem and have it scrutinised by the world’s best data scientists. There are an infinite number of techniques that can be applied to any modelling task but it is impossible to know at the outset which will be most effective. By exposing the problem to a wide audience, competitions are a cost effective way to reach the frontier of what is possible from a given dataset. The power of competitions is neatly illustrated by the results of a recent bioinformatics competition hosted by Kaggle. It required participants to pick markers in HIV’s genetic sequence that coincide with changes in the severity of infection. Within a week and a half, the best entry had already outdone the best methods in the scientific literature. This presentation will cover how competitions typically work, some case studies and the types of business modelling challenges that the Kaggle platform can address.

Speaker: Anthony Goldbloom, Kaggle Pty Ltd

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3:20pm-3:50pm

Breaks /Exhibits
Room: Albert Suites

3:50pm-4:40pm
Human Resources; e-Commerce
Case Study: Naukri.com, Jeevansathi.com
Increasing Marketing ROI and Efficiency of Candidate-Search with Predictive Analytics
InfoEdge, India’s largest and most profitable online firm with a bouquet of internet properties has been Google’s biggest customer in India. Our team used predictive modeling to double our profits across multiple fronts. For Naukri.com, India’s number 1 job portal, predictive models target jobseekers most relevant to the recruiter. Analytical insights provided a deeper understanding of recruiter behaviour and informed a redesign of this product’s recruiter search functionality. This session will describe how we did it, and also reveal how Jeevansathi.com, India’s 2nd-largest matrimony portal, targets the acquisition of consumers in the market for marriage.

 

Speaker: Suvomoy Sarkar, Chief Analytics Officer, HT Media & Info Edge India (parent company of the two companies above)

 

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4:40pm-5:00pm
Closing Remarks

Speaker: Eric Siegel, Ph.D., Program Chair, Predictive Analytics World

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Wednesday November 17, 2010

Full-day Workshop
The Best and the Worst of Predictive Analytics:
Predictive Modeling Methods and Common Data Mining Mistakes
Click here for the detailed workshop description

  • Workshop starts at 9:00am
  • First AM Break from 10:00 – 10:15
  • Second AM Break from 11:15 – 11:30
  • Lunch from 12:30 – 1:15pm
  • First PM Break: 2:00 – 2:15
  • Second PM Break: 3:15 – 3:30
  • Workshop ends at 4:30pm

Speaker: John Elder, Ph.D., CEO and Founder, Elder Research, Inc.

 

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