Thursday, December 13, 2007

Eight great projects

As the Fall semester just came to a close, another cohort of 36 MBAs completed the data mining course at the Smith School of Business. Students worked throughout the semester on real business problems with real data. From data collection, through exploration, and modeling.

Projects ranged from more socially aware (Profiling the medically- insured vs. uninsured in the USA; Reverse-engineering student loan deference algorithms) to more $ aware (Customer retention at an online fitness company; Drivers of dividend decreases) . A few projects on real-estate and travel (Determinants of flight delays from Washington to Honolulu; Factors leading to a quick-sale of condos in Arlington) and one on healthcare (Predicting delays in the operating room), which one the vote of the class for "best project".

To see short presentations and reports on these projects, please see the course webpage.

Finally, I am happy to announce that the course's new official name is "Data Mining for Business Intelligence". On some university webpages "Intelligence" was dropped. But I won't crack any jokes!