O.R. In the News

Abraham Lincoln long ago charged the nation with the duty to “care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan.” NPS Operations Research (OR) student Marine Corps Maj. David Coté has tried to do just that in his seven years of work as a volunteer with the Veteran’s Village of San Diego (VVSD), a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping homeless veterans access the resources and assistance they need to get back on their feet.
 
 Upon learning about data analysis and modeling in his OR curriculum at NPS, Coté found a way to apply his studies to the cause that had long been close to his heart. Come graduation in December, Coté’s master’s thesis research will have produced a tangible model for helping treatment providers identify homeless veterans most at risk for early exit from a treatment program.

According to a recent survey, the use of predictive analytics is on the rise in the insurance industry.

Insurance providers are increasingly interested in data or analytics solutions to help manage producers and improve their performance, according to a recent survey.

Trilogy Insurance & Financial Services partnered with Insurance Networking News to survey more than 100 insurance industry professionals on the current state of predictive analytics in the insurance sector. According to the research findings, insurance providers have made investments in analytics tools over the year but are just beginning to realize the significance of technology to help manage provider performance.

The top three benefits of insurance companies' current data and analytics solutions are customer segmentation, improving the competitive advantage of insurance carriers and retaining existing insurance customers.

Our InformationWeek 2013 Big Data Survey shows that some companies are making progress. For example, most have built the required infrastructure and support various roles, in terms of primary data users; about one-third say they encourage wide access to information for business users. However, when it comes to data acquisition and use models, the wheels start to fall off. There are major gaps in data analysis, even for the most common types of information: transaction data, system logs, email, CRM, Web analytics.

Worse, fewer than 10% of the respondents to our survey say that ideas for promising new data points are primarily driven by a collaborative or cross-functional team within their companies.

1. Business intelligence:

   Organizations are catching on to the idea that with the right data and organization, they can implement better strategies and discover advantages. That’s why employees with business intelligence skills are in demand. They’re able to use knowledge to get ahead and make good decisions for the company. Courses like MIT Sloan School of Management’s Optimization Methods in Management Science are great for learning about the theories and application behind business intelligence and optimization.

Obama's re-election is a compelling demonstration of what can be done when you apply quantitative analysis to large data sets. James Carville's famous phrase – "The economy, stupid" – has been superseded. Now it's the data, stupid.

Big Data and business analytics are two of the most exciting areas in business and IT these days — but for most enterprises, they are still developmental. Although the opportunities are boundless, the road to an effective Big Data operation is fraught with challenges. Here are some of the obstacles companies are encountering — and some ways to get around them.

Having a central analytics team may be a sign that your organization is mature in its analytical ways, says Jack Levis, a vice president with the Institute for Operations and Management Science (INFORMS), a professional society, and director of process management with UPS. But when it comes to embedding analytics into daily business decisions (the goal of many current analytics initiatives, even when they don’t involve massive or unstructured data sets) “you can’t separate the brains”—the statisticians and developers—”from the operations.”

In other words, hiring data scientists and training technologists on Hadoop isn’t the only step business leaders need to take in order to build their capacity to use big data. They also need a structure that makes it easy to coordinate expertise across the enterprise and facilitate collaboration.

But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means.

"We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign," he said after taking the job.

He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official "chief scientist" for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret.

"They are our nuclear codes," campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts.

Anyone who's flown in recent years has encountered the stepped-up security procedures at the airport. But one expert says the focus on the skies ignores a far bigger safety risk these days: Mass transit on the ground.

According to Arnold Barnett, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, people who commute on subways and trains around the world face significantly greater security threats than air passengers. Speaking at the recent annual meeting of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Barnett presented statistics showing that rail and subway transit has become more dangerous than air travel since 2001.

How frequently should breast screening occur, and when it should begin are the topics of a new decision-making model strategy. The current guidelines recommended yearly screening after a woman reached 40 years of age. However, because of the risk of false-positive results, needless biopsies, extra financial costs, and the psychologic anguish caused over treatment, the answer now is “it depends.”
Dr. Oguzhan Alagoz, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (WI, USA), created a decision-making model that to provide a more definitive answer. According to Dr. Alagoz, he can personalize breast-screening decisions to fit a woman’s calculated risk of invasive breast cancer--instead of just focusing on her age.
The model was described in the September/October 2012 issue of the journal Operations Research.

“I can’t talk to you about the world economy. I don’t know anything about the world economy!” Alvin Roth said to a journalist on the phone as he stepped off the treadmill in his office in the Landau Economics Building.

It might be surprising that Roth M.A. ’73 Ph.D. ’74, visiting professor of economics and this year’s winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, claims not to know anything about economics. But Roth does not define himself as an economist.

“I went into operations research with the idea of fixing things up so they work better,” he said. “Operations research led me the game theory, which later on became economics. I just stayed where I was; the borders shifted.”

Often the worst part of a visit to the doctor isn’t the awkward hospital gown, needle sticks or embarrassing physical exams — it’s the drawn-out wait, camped out in the reception room in the company of sick patients and old magazines.

During a particularly long wait to see his dermatologist, Parker Oks, 18, thought there had to be a better way.

“They know approximately how long an appointment will take,” said Mr. Oks, a freshman at Boston University. “But the problem is that they don’t know how long it will actually take.”

That realization led Mr. Oks to create Appointment Status, a Web site devoted to improving appointment efficiency and providing patients with information to avoid long waits. Working with three teenagers from Staten Island Technical High School, where he had gone, Mr. Oks aims to make it easier for patients to schedule appointments — and to find out how far behind the doctor may be before settling into a waiting room chair.

Arizona State University is playing a leading role in one of the largest professional conventions coming to Phoenix this year.

The annual meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) is expected to draw more than 4,000 of its members and other experts in the field from around the world to the Phoenix Convention Center Oct. 14-17.

The School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, one of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, is one of the major organizers of the conference. The school’s director, professor Ronald Askin, is the general chair for the event.

The field of operations research and management science applies analytical methods and mathematical modeling to solve problems in a wide range of industrial sectors, including manufacturing, transportation, service industries, government operations and logistics.

It’s a large part of the field of decision systems engineering, an area of expertise shared by most of ASU’s industrial engineering faculty.

That expertise “is being applied to health care, corporate strategic planning, business operations management, military intelligence and homeland security, and to education and humanitarian relief efforts,” Askin says.

“Ultimately it’s about understanding how organizations and systems behave and the optimal allocation of resources to maximize their performance,” he explains.

As President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney square off against each other tonight in the first of their three debates, the airwaves will be abuzz with pundits analyzing what each says and how that might affect the election outcome. You can judge for yourself or follow along with the analysis, but I, for one, will wait for the hard numbers to tell me who bested whom...

The data is only as good as the last poll results -- so this could change come tomorrow, post debate, as Sheldon Jacobson, co-creator of Election Analytics, told me in a phone interview last week. He recounted the 2008 election, when in mid-September the Election Analytics tool showed candidate Sen. John McCain having a sizable lead over Obama. "But by the end of September, that lead was gone and McCain never caught back up," according to the tool results...

You can read more about the methodology, including how polling data for each state is weighted and how Election Analytics takes into account swing scenarios, here. In addition, if you happen to be attending the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) annual meeting in mid-October, you can catch Jacobson in person as he'll be presenting on US presidential forecasting.

The latest polls show a tight 2012 presidential race, with incumbent Barack Obama maintaining a slight edge over challenger Mitt Romney. But according to two experienced election forecasters, President Obama is almost guaranteed a victory on November 6th.

Using two very different forecasting models, University of Illinois professor Sheldon Jacobson and American University professor Allan Lichtman have essentially reached the same conclusion: Unless a dramatic event occurs between now and Election Day to sway more voters toward the Republican candidate, a second term for President Obama is pretty much a lock.

Obviously, some Republicans may deride Jacobson and Lichtman as purveyors of partisan politics, but the professors insist their findings are based on sound analytics, not politics.

"We don't have any background in politics at all. We're completely neutral. We're not bipartisan, we're nonpartisan," said Dr. Jacobson, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois, in a phone interview with InformationWeek.

Jacobson and Lichtman will discuss their findings next month at the annual meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in Phoenix, Arizona.

Crucially, instead of basing major business decisions on intuition, they need to mine the data and information at their disposal to drive rapid decision making.

This is why analytics - the use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models - has moved centre-stage.

According to market research firm IDC, the market for business analytics software grew 14 percent in 2011 and will hit US$50.7bn by 2016.

A new study in the [INFORMS] journal Organization Science finds that when managers have to explain their pay-raise decisions to employees, they give more money to men than they do to women -- even if the workers' performance is equal. 

Will the cloud push business intelligence and analytics to a whole new level? Since cloud-based services can support massive amounts of data and provide it in a consistent manner across enterprises, there’s reason to believe that even the most technology-averse organizations will have a way to compete on analytics, just as the big players do.

Operations research is a very analytics-intensive profession. Has that always been known in the industry?
Not really. People looking for analytics resources don’t necessarily associate that with operations research. We, the society, decided to take a more aggressive stance in saying that we do, in fact, do what people are looking for. Analytics magazine was an effort to introduce people to INFORMS and provide them with stories and ways to use analytics. We now have more than 7,000 subscribers to the magazine.

Over the past three decades women’s median income has increased 63%, and now more than a third of working wives earn more than their husbands. It’s no surprise when, although they were once discouraged from pursuing higher education, women now surpass men in achievement of bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Across sectors, women continue earning only 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, but more and more they are landing high-paying professional jobs and narrowing the gap. An analysis of the median weekly earnings of full-time American workers in 2011 by occupation and gender, as tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows the top 20 jobs where women are earning the most. All require some college and most are concentrated in health care, science and technology, and business fields.

At No. 1, pharmacist is the best-paying job for women, where they earn a median of $1,898 a week or approximately $99,000 a year...

No. 8: Operations Research Analysts
Median weekly earnings: $1,326
Approximate median yearly earnings: $69,000
Women as percentage of the profession: 44%
Earnings as percentage of men’s earnings: 105%