Heuristics in Analytics: A Practical Perspective of What Influences Our Analytical World(Wiley and SAS Business Series)

Table of Contents:
Preface xi Acknowledgments xix About the Authors xxiii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 The Monty Hall Problem 5 Evolving Analytics 8 Summary 18 Chapter 2: Unplanned Events, Heuristics, and the Randomness in Our World 23 Heuristics Concepts 26 The Butterfly Effect 30 Random Walks 37 Summary 44 Chapter 3: The Heuristic Approach and Why We Use It 45 Heuristics in Computing 47 Heuristic Problem-Solving Methods 51 Genetic Algorithms: A Formal Heuristic Approach 54 Summary 67 Chapter 4: The Analytical Approach 69 Introduction to Analytical Modeling 71 The Competitive-Intelligence Cycle 74 Summary 97 Chapter 5: Knowledge Applications That Solve Business Problems 101 Customer Behavior Segmentation 102 Collection Models 106 Insolvency Prevention 113 Fraud-Propensity Models 120 Summary 127 Chapter 6: The Graph Analysis Approach 129 Introduction to Graph Analysis 130 Summary 143 Chapter 7: Graph Analysis Case Studies 147 Case Study: Identifying Influencers in Telecommunications 149 Case Study: Claim Validity Detection in Motor Insurance 162 Case Study: Fraud Identification in Mobile Operations 178 Summary 188 Chapter 8: Text Analytics 191 Text Analytics in the Competitive-Intelligence Cycle 193 Linguistic Models 198 Text-Mining Models 200 Summary 207 Bibliography 209 Index 217

About the Author :
CARLOS ANDRE REIS PINHEIRO is Visiting Professor at KU Leuven, Belgium. He headed the Analytical Lab at Oi in Brazil, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Latin America. Pinheiro has conducted Postdoctoral Research at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, Université de Savoie, France and Dublin City University, Ireland. He holds a PhD in Engineering from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He worked at Brazil Telecom for almost ten years and also accomplished postdoctoral research at IMPA, Brazil, one of the most prestigious mathematical institutions in the world. He has published several papers in international journals and conferences and has four books (all in Portuguese) that focus on the internet, database, web warehousing, and analytical intelligence. He is the author of Social Network Analysis in Telecommunications, published by Wiley. FIONA McNEILL has applied analytics to business problems since she began her career in 1992 and has consistently helped companies benefit from strategic use of data and analytics. Throughout her career, she has been affiliated with data and technology companies, from information and survey providers, IBM Global Services and for over fifteen years, at SAS. McNeill has published in academic journals, conducted education seminars and presented at both academic and industry conferences over the course of her career. She holds an M.A. in Quantitative Behavioral Geography from McMaster University, and graduated cum laude with a B.Sc. in Bio-Physical Systems, University of Toronto.