Month: January 2013

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Business analytics student projects a valuable ground for industry-academia ties

gshmueli

Since October 2012, I have taught multiple courses on data mining and on forecasting. Teams of students worked on projects spanning various industries, from retail to eCommerce to telecom. Each project presents a business problem or opportunity that is translated into a data mining or forecasting problem. Using real data, the team then executes the analytics solution, evaluates it and presents recommendations. A select set of project reports and presentations is available on my website (search for 2012 Nov and 2012 Dec projects). For projects this year, we used three datasets from regional sources (thanks to our industry partners Hansa … Continue reading Business analytics student projects a valuable ground for industry-academia ties

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Predictive modeling and interventions (why you need post-intervention data)

gshmueli

In the last few months I’ve been involved in nearly 20 data mining projects done by student teams at ISB, as part of the MBA-level course and an executive education program.  All projects relied on real data. One of the data sources was transactional data from a large regional hyper market. While the topics of the projects ranged across a large spectrum of business goals and opportunities for retail, one point in particular struck me as repeating across many projects and in many face-to-face discussions. The use of secondary data (data that were already collected for some purpose) for making … Continue reading Predictive modeling and interventions (why you need post-intervention data)

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What does “business analytics” mean in academia?

gshmueli

But what exactly does this mean? In the recent ISIS conference, I organized and moderated a panel called “Business Analytics and Big Data: How it affects Business School Research and Teaching“. The goal was to tackle the ambiguity in the terms “Business Analytics” and “Big Data” in the context of business school research and teaching. I opened with a few points: Some research b-schools are posting job ads for tenure-track faculty in “Business Analytics” (e.g., University of Maryland; Google “professor business analytics position” for plenty more). What does this mean? what is supposed to be the background of these candidates … Continue reading What does “business analytics” mean in academia?