CIS Department Talk - Tuesday November 1, 2005

The Department of Computer and Information Science & The Society of Computer Science Present

Speaker:	Dr. Bianca Zadrozny
Topic:	Wallet Estimation Models
Date:	Tuesday November 1, 2005, 3:30-4:30pm
Place:	John Mulcahy Hall, Rm 138 (Rose Hill Campus)

The wallet of a customer is defined as the total amount this customer can spend in a specific product category. This is a vital piece of information for planning, marketing and sales efforts. We discuss the important problem of customer wallet estimation, while emphasizing the use of predictive modeling technologies to generate useful estimates, and minimizing reliance on primary research. We suggest several customer wallet definitions and corresponding evaluation approaches. Our main contribution is in presenting several new predictive modeling approaches which allow us to estimate customer wallets, despite the fact that they are typically unobserved. We present empirical results on the success of these modeling approaches, using a dataset of IBM customers.

Bianca Zadrozny joined the Data Analytics Research group at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in September 2003, shortly after receiving her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. While a Ph.D. student, Bianca was the recipient of an NSF Graduate Fellowship and an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. She also holds an M.S. degree from UCSD and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Pontificia Universidada Catolica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her research interests are in machine learning and data mining, particularly in the applications to problems in business analytics.