Friday, April 06, 2012

What I'm Working On

Sometimes folks ask me what I'm doing, so I thought I'd share a few things on my plate right now:

Courses and Conferences
1. Reading several papers for the KDD 2012 Conference Industrial / Government Track
2. Preparing for the Predictive Analytics World / Toronto "Advanced Methods Hands-on:
Predictive Modeling Techniques
" workshop on April 27. I'm using the Statsoft Statistica package.
3. Starting preparation for a talk at the Salford Analytics and Data Mining Conference 2012, "A More Transparent Interpretation of Health Club Surveys" on May 24. It will highlight use of the CART software package in the analysis. This was work that motivated interviews with New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, and ended with a mention (albeit *very* briefly) in the fascinating new book by Duhigg, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business".
4. Working through data exercises for the next UCSD-Extension Text Mining Course on May 11, 18, and 25th. I'm using KNIME for this course.

Consulting
Approximately 80% of my time is spent on active consulting. While I can't describe most of the work I'm doing, my current clients are in the following domains:
1. Web Analytics and email remarketing for retail via a great startup company, Smarter Remarketer headed by Angel Morales (Founder and Chief Innovation Officer), Howard Bates (CEO), and me (Founder and Chief Scientist).
2. Customer Acquisition, web/online and offline (2 clients)
3. Tax Modeling (2 clients)
4. Data mining software tool selection for a large health care provider.

Here's to productive application of predictive analytics!

7 comments:

Will Dwinnell said...

Are you competing in KDD Cup 2012?

Dean Abbott said...

I'm not...would be fun, but no time for such fun. You?

Will Dwinnell said...

Not this year, no. I wish I had the time.

RubeRad said...

Hey Dean,

Just discovered you have a blog! Is "Web Analytics and email remarketing for retail" fancy talk for "spam"?

Also, is "Text Mining" code for "Perl"?

r

SalfordSystems said...

Looking forward to your talk at ADMC!
Cheers!

Dean Abbott said...

Ruben: you wound me! :)

Email remarketing, as any marketing, can be done responsibly or irresponsibly. When done responsibly, email is (1) sent only to people who have opted in and are OK with receiving emails from the company, and (2) remind people of the items they showed interest in already, or are likely to be items they have interest in.

Text mining: you can do it is perl...hey, I've done significant text mining just using regular expressions! But there is so much more to it than that. The continuum of approaches ranges from looking for plain character patterns (like REs) to using full language characteristics to try to ascertain the actual meaning of the text ("Natural Language Processing"). The latter is quite sophisticated algorithmically. The UCSD-Extension text mining course I teach is a gentle introduction to the middle ground (between REs and NLP, which touching on both).

RubeRad said...

Dean,

Good to know you haven't crossed over to the Dark Side!

I never really thought you could though...

Also good to see you're helping save the world with reCaptcha!