Question: Predictive customer response modeling for decision support in direct marketing strategies.

In the realm of data mining and knowledge discovery, ensemble methods have emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing predictive accuracy through the combination of multiple models. This technique, which aggregates predictions from various models to produce a more robust final output, has gained significant traction in the field. By integrating diverse perspectives and mitigating the risk of overfitting, ensemble methods offer a compelling solution for improving decision-making processes. Access to a comprehensive collection of resources on ensemble methods is now readily available online, providing a treasure trove of information for researchers and practitioners. This digital repository serves as a gateway to a wealth of knowledge on data mining and predictive analytics, featuring insights from experts across the globe. The availability of such materials not only supports the advancement of the field but also facilitates the application of ensemble methods in real-world scenarios, particularly in the context of direct marketing decision support. By leveraging predictive customer response modeling, businesses can make more informed decisions, tailor their marketing strategies, and ultimately enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.

This paper presents a use case of data mining for sales forecasting in retail demand and sales prediction. In particular, the Extreme Gradient Boosting algorithm is used to design a prediction model to accurately estimate probable sales for retail outlets of a major European Pharmacy retailing company. The forecast of potential sales is based on a mixture of temporal and economical features including prior sales data, store promotions, retail competitors, school and state holidays, location and accessibility of the store as well as the time of year. The model building process was guided by common sense reasoning and by analytic knowledge discovered during data analysis and definitive conclusions were drawn. The performances of the XGBoost predictor were compared with those of more traditional regression algorithms like Linear Regression and Random Forest Regression. Findings not only reveal that the XGBoost algorithm outperforms the traditional modeling approaches with regard to prediction accuracy, but it also uncovers new knowledge that is hidden in data which help in building a more robust feature set and strengthen the sales prediction model.

This study proposed an integrated data mining and customer behavior scoring model to manage existing mobile banking users in an Iranian bank. This segmentation model was developed to identify groups of customers based on transaction history, recency, frequency, monetary background. It classified mobile banking users into six groups. This study demonstrated that identifying customers by a behavioral scoring facilitates marketing strategy assignment. Then the bank can develop its marketing actions. Thus, the bank can attract more customers, maintain its customers, and keep high customers' satisfaction. Keywords—Data mining; mobile data, mobile banking; customer segmentation Introduction Online banking is increasingly common. Financial institutions deliver online services via various electronic channels, subsequently diminishing the importance of conventional branch networks. The newly emerging channels of online banking and rapidly increasing penetration rates of mobile phones motivate this study (C. S. Chen, 2013). The internet has had a significant impact on financial institutions, allowing consumers to access many bank facilities 24 hours a day, while allowing banks to significantly cut their costs. Research has shown that online banking is the cheapest delivery channel for many banking services (KoenigLewis, Palmer, & Moll, 2010; Robinson, 2000). A number of studies have identified advantages to bank customers, including cost and time savings as well as spatial independence benefits (Koenig-Lewis et al., 2010). According to Gartner’s prediction of leading trends of 2012 in mobile applications, mobile commerce (m-commerce) remains the most important one. Gartner further forecasts that mobile devices will replace PCs as the main device to access the internet. As for the third quarter of 2012, IPSOS indicated that “The era of Multi-Screen has come, and smartphones account for the purchasing behavior of 65% of mobile device users.” According to that report, 66 percent of the smartphone holders in Taiwan access the internet via a smartphone at least once daily; approximately 57 percent of the customers perform mobile searches; and 40 percent of the customers shop via mobile phones (IPSOS, 2012). These statistics reflect vigorous growth in the scale of m-commerce. However, mobile banking remains in its infancy, and international adoption rates demonstrate the strong potential of m-commerce (FRB, 2012). Therefore, data mining for mobile banking is of priority concern for further developing mobile banking services (MBSs) (C.

Extensive data on functional capabilities, customer base demographics, financial status, pricing and other quantitative attributes gained via a requestfor-information process engaging vendors in this market. Interactive briefings in which vendors provided Gartner with updates on their strategy, market positioning, recent key developments and product road map. A Web-based survey of reference customers provided by each vendor, which captured data on usage patterns, levels of satisfaction with major product functionality categories, various nontechnology-related vendor attributes (such as pricing, product support and overall service delivery), and more. In total, 333 organizations across all major world regions provided input on their experiences with vendors and tools in this manner. Feedback about tools and vendors captured during conversations with users of Gartner's client inquiry service. Market share and revenue growth estimates developed by Gartner's Technology and Service Provider research unit.

As key roles of online social networks, influential users in micro-blogging have the ability to influence the attitudes or behaviour of others. When it comes to marketing, the users’ influence should be associated with a certain topic or field on which people have different levels of preference and expertise. In order to identify and predict influential users in a specific topic more effectively, users’ actual influential capability on a certain topic and potential influence unlimited by topics is combined into a novel comprehensive framework named “ACQR” in this research. ACQR framework depicts the attributes of the influentials from four aspects, including activeness (A), centrality (C), quality of post (Q) and reputation (R). Based on this framework, a data mining method is developed for discovering and forecasting the top influentials. Empirical results reveal that our ACQR framework and the data mining method by TOPSIS and SVMs (with polynomial and RBF kernels) can perform very well in identifying and predicting influential users in a certain topic (such as iPhone 5). Furthermore, the dynamic change processes of users’ influence from longitudinal perspective are analysed and suggestions to the sales managers are provided.

5 Nowadays computers are in the middle of most economic transactions. 6 These “computer-mediated transactions” generate huge amounts of 7 data, and new tools can be used to manipulate and analyze this data. 8 This essay offers a brief introduction to some of these tools and meth9 ods. 10 Computers are now involved in many economic transactions and can cap11 ture data associated with these transactions, which can then be manipulated 12 and analyzed. Conventional statistical and econometric techniques such as 13 regression often work well but there are issues unique to big data sets that 14 may require different tools. 15 First, the sheer size of the data involved may require more powerful data 16 manipulation tools. Second, we may have more potential predictors than 17 appropriate for estimation, so we need to do some kind of variable selection. 18 Third, large data sets may allow for more flexible relationships than simple 19 ∗Hal Varian is Chief Economist, Google Inc., Mountain View, California, and Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California. Thanks to Jeffrey Oldham, Tom Zhang, Rob On, Pierre Grinspan, Jerry Friedman, Art Owen, Steve Scott, Bo Cowgill, Brock Noland, Daniel Stonehill, Robert Snedegar, Gary King, the editors of this journal for comments on earlier versions of this paper. 1 linear models. Machine learning techniques such as decision trees, support 20 vector machines, neural nets, deep learning and so on may allow for more 21 effective ways to model complex relationships. 22 In this essay I will describe a few of these tools for manipulating and an23 alyzing big data. I believe that these methods have a lot to offer and should 24 be more widely known and used by economists. In fact, my standard advice 25 to graduate students these days is “go to the computer science department 26 and take a class in machine learning.” There have been very fruitful collabo27 rations between computer scientists and statisticians in the last decade or so, 28 and I expect collaborations between computer scientists and econometricians 29 will also be productive in the future. 30 1 Tools to manipulate big data 31 Economists have historically dealt with data that fits in a spreadsheet, but 32 that is changing as new more detailed data becomes available; see Einav 33 and Levin [2013] for several examples and discussion. If you have more 34 than a million or so rows in a spreadsheet, you probably want to store it in a 35 relational database, such as MySQL. Relational databases offer a flexible way 36 to store, manipulate and retrieve data using a Structured Query Language 37 (SQL) which is easy to learn and very useful for dealing with medium-sized 38 data sets. 39 However, if you have several gigabytes of data or several million observa40 tions, standard relational databases become unwieldy. Databases to manage 41 data of this size are generically known as “NoSQL” databases. The term is 42 used rather loosely, but is sometimes interpreted as meaning “not only SQL.” 43 NoSQL databases are more primitive than SQL databases in terms of data 44 manipulation capabilities but can handle larger amounts of data. 45 Due to the rise of computer mediated transactions, many companies have 46 found it necessary to develop systems to process billions of transactions per 47

This study presents an approach to predict the performance of sales agents of a call center dedicated exclusively to sales and telemarketing activities. This approach is based on a naive Bayesian classifier. The objective is to know what levels of the attributes are indicative of individuals who perform well. A sample of 1037 sales agents was taken during the period between March and September of 2009 on campaigns related to insurance sales and service pre-paid phone services, to build the naive Bayes network. It has been shown that, socio-demographic attributes are not suitable for predicting performance. Alternatively, operational records were used to predict production of sales agents, achieving satisfactory results. In this case, the classifier training and testing is done through a stratified tenfold cross-validation. It classified the instances correctly 80.60% of times, with the proportion of false positives of 18.1% for class no (does not achieve minimum) and 20.8% for the class yes (achieves equal or above minimum acceptable). These results suggest that socio-demographic attributes has no predictive power on performance, while the operational information of the activities of the sale agent can predict the future performance of the

The escalation and convergence of distributed networks and wireless telecommunications has created a tremendous potential platform for providing business services. In consumer markets, mobile marketing is expected to be a key growth area. The immediacy, interactivity and mobility of wireless devices provide a novel platform for marketing. The personal and ubiquitous nature of devices means that interactivity can be provided anytime and anywhere. However, as experience has shown, it is important to keep the consumer in mind. Mobile marketing permission and acceptance are core issues that marketers have yet to fully explain or resolve. This paper provides direction in this area. After briefly discussing some background on mobile marketing, the paper conceptualises key characteristics for mobile marketing permission and acceptance. The paper concludes with predictions on the future of mobile marketing and some core areas of further research.

Data mining technique has attracted attention in the information industry and society as a whole, because of the big amount of data and the imminent need to transform that data into useful information and knowledge. Recently conducted studies with successfully demarcated results using this technique, to estimate several parameters in a variety of domains. However, the effective use of data in some areas is still developing, as is the case of sports, which has shown moderate growth. In this context, the objective of this article is to present a systematic review of the literature about research involving sports data mining. As systematic searches were made out in five databases, resulting in 21 articles that answered a question that grounded this article.

The variety of available digital tools, strategies and activities might confuse and disorient even an experienced marketer. This applies in particular to B2B companies, which are usually less flexible in uptaking of digital technology than B2C companies. B2B companies are lacking a framework that corresponds to the specifics of the B2B business, and which helps to evaluate a company’s capabilities and to choose an appropriate path. A B2B digital marketing maturity model helps to fill this gap. However, modern marketing offers no widely approved digital marketing maturity model, and thus, some marketing institutions provide their own tools. The purpose of this paper is building an optimized B2B digital marketing maturity model based on a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of existing models. The current study provides an analytical review of the existing digital marketing maturity models with open access. The results of the research are twofold. First, the provided SWOT analysis outlines the main advantages and disadvantages of existing models. Secondly, the strengths of existing digital marketing maturity models, helps to identify the main characteristics and the structure of an optimized B2B digital marketing maturity model. The research findings indicate that only one out of three analyzed models could be used as a separate tool. This study is among the first examining the use of maturity models in digital marketing. It helps businesses to choose between the existing digital marketing models, the most effective one. Moreover, it creates a base for future research on digital marketing maturity models. This study contributes to the emerging B2B digital marketing literature by providing a SWOT analysis of the existing digital marketing maturity models and suggesting a structure and main characteristics of an optimized B2B digital marketing maturity model. Keywords—B2B digital marketing strategy, digital marketing, digital marketing maturity model, SWOT analysis.

Customer churn analysis and prediction play an important role in customer relationship management and improve benefit of enterprise. According to the bank's customer churn data which is large scale and imbalance, this paper presented a support vector machine model to predict customer churn. The method was compared with artificial neural network, decision tree, logistic regression and naive Bayesian classifier regarding customer churn prediction for a commercial bank's VIP customers. It is found that the method has the best accuracy rate, hit rate, covering rate and lift coefficient, and provides an effective measurement for bank's customer churn prediction.


Question: Predictive customer response modeling for decision support in direct marketing strategies.

This study explores the commercial utilization of segmentation and predictive modeling strategies within the realm of database marketing (DBM) in the Netherlands, an area that has not been extensively researched previously. Our findings, derived from a survey encompassing 228 DBM enterprises, reveal that decision-making processes in these companies are predominantly guided by managerial intuition, alongside traditional methods such as RFM analysis and cross-tabulation. Interestingly, our analysis suggests a positive correlation between the adoption of segmentation and predictive response modeling techniques and factors such as the scale of the company and its database, the frequency of customer interactions, and the reliance on direct distribution channels. Survey respondents have expressed a keen interest in future studies that focus on the adaptation of these models for the digital age, specifically for Internet marketing, as well as the exploration of long-term outcomes of direct marketing strategies, consumer reaction to direct marketing communications, and the refinement of segmentation and predictive modeling methodologies. Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Prepaid customers in mobile telecommunications are not bound by a contract and can therefore change operators (‘churn’) at their convenience and without notification. This makes the task of predicting prepaid churn both challenging and financially rewarding. This paper presents an explorative, real world study of prepaid churn modeling by varying the experimental setup on three dimensions: data, outcome definition and population sample. Firstly, we add Customer Experience Management (CEM) data to data traditionally used for prepaid churn prediction. Secondly, we vary the outcome definition of prepaid churn. Thirdly, we alter the sample of the customers included, based on their inactivity period at the time of recording. While adding CEM parameters did not influence the predictability of churn, one variation on the sample and especially a particular change in the outcome definition had a substantial

In this paper, we investigate the performance of several systems based on ensemble of classifiers for bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring. The obtained results are very encouraging, our results improved the performance obtained using the stand-alone classifiers. We show that the method ‘‘Random Subspace” outperforms the other ensemble methods tested in this paper. Moreover, the best stand-alone method is the multi-layer perceptron neural net, while the best method tested in this work is the Random Subspace of Levenberg–Marquardt neural net. In this work, three financial datasets are chosen for the experiments: Australian credit, German credit, and Japanese credit. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

As an important part of the Internet economy, online markets have gained much interest in research community as well as industry. Researchers have studied various aspects of online markets including motivations of consumer behaviors on online markets. However, due to the lack of log data of consumers' online behaviors including their purchase, it has not been thoroughly investigated or validated on what drives consumers to purchase products on online markets. Our research moves forward from prior studies by analyzing consumers' actual online behaviors that lead to actual purchases, and using datasets from multiple online shopping sites that can provide comparisons across different types of online shopping sites. We analyzed consumers' buying process and constructed consumers' behavior trajectory to gain deeper understanding of consumer behaviors on online markets. We find that a substantial portion (24%) of consumers in a general-purpose marketplace (like eBay) discover items from external sources (e.g., price comparison sites), while most (>95%) of consumers in a special-purpose shopping site directly access items from the site itself. We also reveal that item browsing patterns and cart usage patterns are the important predictors of the actual purchases. Using behavioral features identified by our analysis, we developed a prediction model to infer whether a consumer purchases item(s). Our prediction model of purchases achieved over 80% accuracy across four different online shopping sites.

Predictive modeling is invaded by elastic, yet complex methods such as neural networks or ensembles (model stacking, boosting or bagging). Such methods are usually described by a large number of parameters or hyper parameters a price that one needs to pay for elasticity. The very number of parameters makes models hard to understand. This paper describes a consistent collection of explainers for predictive models, a.k.a. black boxes. Each explainer is a technique for exploration of a black box model. Presented approaches are model-agnostic, what means that they extract useful information from any predictive method despite its internal structure. Each explainer is linked with a specific aspect of a model. Some are useful in decomposing predictions, some serve better in understanding performance, while others are useful in understanding importance and conditional responses of a particular variable. Every explainer presented in this paper works for a single model or for a collection of models. In the latter case, models can be compared against each other. Such comparison helps to find strengths and weaknesses of different approaches and gives additional possibilities for model validation. Presented explainers are implemented in the DALEX package for R. They are based on a uniform standardized grammar of model exploration which may be easily extended. The current implementation supports the most popular frameworks for classification and regression.

Organizations have been collecting data for decades, building massive data warehouses in which to store the data. Even though this data is available, very few of these organizations have been able to realize the actual value stored in it. The question these organizations are asking is how to extract meaningful data and uncover patterns and relationship from their databases. This paper presents a study of regression analysis for use in stock price prediction. Data were obtained from the daily official list of the prices of all shares traded on the stock exchange published by the Nigerian Stock Exchange using banking sector of Nigerian economy with three banks namely:First Bank of Nigeria Plc, Zenith Bank Plc, and Skye Bank Plc to build a database. A data mining software tool was used to uncover patterns and relationships and also to extract values of variables from the database to predict the future values of other variables through the use of time series data that employed moving average method. The tools were found capable technique to describe the trends of stock market prices and predict the future stock market prices of three banks sampled.

In this paper, we review decision support models for the design of global supply chains, and assess the fit between the research literature in this area and the practical issues of global supply chain design. The classification scheme for this review is based on ongoing and emerging issues in global supply chain management and includes review dimensions for (1) decisions addressed in the model, (2) performance metrics, (3) the degree to which the model supports integrated decision processes, and (4) globalization considerations. We conclude that although most models resolve a difficult feature associated with globalization, few models address the practical global supply chain design problem in its entirety. We close the paper with recommendations for future research in global supply chain modeling that is both forward-looking and practically oriented. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A behavior-based telecom customer churn prediction system is presented in this paper. Unlike conventional churn prediction methods, which use customer demographics, contractual data, customer service logs, call-details, complaint data, bill and payment as inputs and churn as target output, only customer service usage information is included in this system to predict customer churn using a clustering algorithm. It can solve the problems which traditional methods have to face, such as missing or non-reliable data and the correlation among inputs. This study provides a new way to solve traditional churn prediction problems.

This paper critically analyses the nature and state of decision support systems (DSS) research. To provide context for the analysis, a history of DSS is presented which focuses on the evolution of a number of sub-groupings of research and practice: personal decision support systems, group support systems, negotiation support systems, intelligent decision support systems, knowledge managementbased DSS, executive information systems/business intelligence, and data warehousing. To understand the state of DSS research an empirical investigation of published DSS research is presented. This investigation is based on the detailed analysis of 1,020 DSS articles published in 14 major journals from 1990 to 2003. The analysis found that DSS publication has been falling steadily since its peak in 1994 and the current publication rate is at early 1990s levels. Other findings include that personal DSS and group support systems dominate research activity and data warehousing is the least published type of DSS. The journal DSS is the major publishing outlet; US ‘Other’ journals dominate DSS publishing and there is very low exposure of DSS in European journals. Around two-thirds of DSS research is empirical, a much higher proportion than general IS research. DSS empirical research is 1 Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Gemma Dodson for research assistance, especially in obtaining articles and coding, and Peter O’Donnell for discussions about DSS history. The research was partially supported by a Monash University Small Grant and a Curtin University Visiting Professorship. Preliminary results from the empirical study were presented at the 2004 IFIP International Conference on Decision Support Systems, Prato, Italy and the 2004 Australasian Conference on Information Systems, Hobart, Australia.

Previous studies propose that associative classification has high classification accuracy and strong flexibility at handling unstructured data. However, it still suffers from the huge set of mined rules and sometimes biased classification or overfitting since the classification is based on only single high-confidence rule. In this study, we propose a new associative classification method, CMAR, i.e., Classification based on Multiple Association Rules. The method extends an efficient frequent pattern mining method, FP-growth, constructs a class distribution-associated FP-tree, and mines large database efficiently. Moreover, it applies a CR-tree structure to store and retrieve mined association rules efficiently, and prunes rules effectively based on confidence, correlation and database coverage. The classification is performed based on a weighted analysis using multiple strong association rules. Our extensive experiments on databases from UCI machine learning database repository show that CMAR is consistent, highly effective at classification of various kinds of databases and has better average classification accuracy in comparison with CBA and C4.5. Moreover, our performance study shows that the method is highly efficient and scalable in comparison with other reported associative classification methods.

As with many other sectors the amount of agriculture data based are increasing on a daily basis. However, the application of data mining methods and techniques to discover new insights or knowledge is a relatively a novel research area. In this paper we provide a brief review of a variety of Data Mining techniques that have been applied to model data from or about the agricultural domain. The Data Mining techniques applied on Agricultural data include k-means, bi clustering, k nearest neighbor, Neural Networks (NN) Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes Classifier and Fuzzy c-means. As can be seen the appropriateness of data mining techniques is to a certain extent determined by the different types of agricultural data or the problems being addressed. This survey summarize the application of data mining techniques and predictive modeling application in the agriculture field.


Question: Predictive customer response modeling for decision support in direct marketing strategies.

Transitioning to a Service-Oriented Dominant Logic in Marketing

Marketing's foundational principles have historically been grounded in an economic model centered on the exchange of tangible goods, typically the output of manufacturing processes. This traditional paradigm was characterized by a focus on physical assets, the creation of intrinsic value, and the execution of discrete transactions. However, in recent years, the field of marketing has witnessed the emergence of new conceptual frameworks that place a greater emphasis on intangible assets, the collaborative creation of value, and the establishment of enduring relationships between businesses and their customers.

We posit that these novel viewpoints are coalescing into a new dominant logic for marketing, one that prioritizes service delivery over the mere exchange of goods as the cornerstone of economic transactions. This service-dominant logic (SDL) reconceptualizes marketing theory, practice, and education, necessitating a fundamental shift in perspective for scholars, professionals, and educators alike.

In exploring the evolution of this new logic, we delve into the implications for marketing theory, where the focus shifts from the exchange of tangible goods to the provision of services, and from the traditional product-centric view to a more holistic, customer-centric approach. Practitioners must adapt their strategies to prioritize customer experience and engagement, recognizing that value is co-created through interactions between the service provider and the customer. For marketing educators, the SDL necessitates a curriculum overhaul that integrates service concepts, experiential learning, and a deeper understanding of customer relationships.

This transition to a service-oriented dominant logic in marketing is not merely a theoretical exercise; it is a response to the changing dynamics of the market and the evolving expectations of consumers. As such, it represents a critical juncture for the marketing discipline, offering both challenges and opportunities for growth and innovation.

Organizations have been collecting data for decades, building massive data warehouses in which to store the data. Even though this data is available, very few of these organizations have been able to realize the actual value stored in it. The question these organizations are asking is how to extract meaningful data and uncover patterns and relationship from their databases. This paper presents a study of regression analysis for use in stock price prediction. Data were obtained from the daily official list of the prices of all shares traded on the stock exchange published by the Nigerian Stock Exchange using banking sector of Nigerian economy with three banks namely:First Bank of Nigeria Plc, Zenith Bank Plc, and Skye Bank Plc to build a database. A data mining software tool was used to uncover patterns and relationships and also to extract values of variables from the database to predict the future values of other variables through the use of time series data that employed moving average method. The tools were found capable technique to describe the trends of stock market prices and predict the future stock market prices of three banks sampled.

Predictive modeling is invaded by elastic, yet complex methods such as neural networks or ensembles (model stacking, boosting or bagging). Such methods are usually described by a large number of parameters or hyper parameters a price that one needs to pay for elasticity. The very number of parameters makes models hard to understand. This paper describes a consistent collection of explainers for predictive models, a.k.a. black boxes. Each explainer is a technique for exploration of a black box model. Presented approaches are model-agnostic, what means that they extract useful information from any predictive method despite its internal structure. Each explainer is linked with a specific aspect of a model. Some are useful in decomposing predictions, some serve better in understanding performance, while others are useful in understanding importance and conditional responses of a particular variable. Every explainer presented in this paper works for a single model or for a collection of models. In the latter case, models can be compared against each other. Such comparison helps to find strengths and weaknesses of different approaches and gives additional possibilities for model validation. Presented explainers are implemented in the DALEX package for R. They are based on a uniform standardized grammar of model exploration which may be easily extended. The current implementation supports the most popular frameworks for classification and regression.

Review websites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, allow users to post online reviews for various businesses, products and services, and have been recently shown to have a significant influence on consumer shopping behaviour. An online review typically consists of free-form text and a star rating out of 5. The problem of predicting a user’s star rating for a product, given the user’s text review for that product, is called Review Rating Prediction and has lately become a popular, albeit hard, problem in machine learning. In this paper, we treat Review Rating Prediction as a multi-class classification problem, and build sixteen different prediction models by combining four feature extraction methods, (i) unigrams, (ii) bigrams, (iii) trigrams and (iv) Latent Semantic Indexing, with four machine learning algorithms, (i) logistic regression, (ii) Näıve Bayes classification, (iii) perceptrons, and (iv) linear Support Vector Classification. We analyse the performance of each of these sixteen models to come up with the best model for predicting the ratings from reviews. We use the dataset provided by Yelp for training and testing the models.

Nowadays there are many risks related to bank loans, especially for the banks so as to reduce their capital loss. The analysis of risks and assessment of default becomes crucial thereafter. Banks hold huge volumes of customer behaviour related data from which they are unable to arrive at a judgement if an applicant can be defaulter or not. Data Mining is a promising area of data analysis which aims to extract useful knowledge from tremendous amount of complex data sets. This work aims to develop a model and construct a prototype for the same using a data set available in the UCI repository. The model is a decision tree based classification model that uses the functions available in the R Package. Prior to building the model, the dataset is pre-processed, reduced and made ready to provide efficient predictions. The final model is used for prediction with the test dataset and the experimental results prove the efficiency of the built model.

5 Nowadays computers are in the middle of most economic transactions. 6 These “computer-mediated transactions” generate huge amounts of 7 data, and new tools can be used to manipulate and analyze this data. 8 This essay offers a brief introduction to some of these tools and meth9 ods. 10 Computers are now involved in many economic transactions and can cap11 ture data associated with these transactions, which can then be manipulated 12 and analyzed. Conventional statistical and econometric techniques such as 13 regression often work well but there are issues unique to big data sets that 14 may require different tools. 15 First, the sheer size of the data involved may require more powerful data 16 manipulation tools. Second, we may have more potential predictors than 17 appropriate for estimation, so we need to do some kind of variable selection. 18 Third, large data sets may allow for more flexible relationships than simple 19 ∗Hal Varian is Chief Economist, Google Inc., Mountain View, California, and Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California. Thanks to Jeffrey Oldham, Tom Zhang, Rob On, Pierre Grinspan, Jerry Friedman, Art Owen, Steve Scott, Bo Cowgill, Brock Noland, Daniel Stonehill, Robert Snedegar, Gary King, the editors of this journal for comments on earlier versions of this paper. 1 linear models. Machine learning techniques such as decision trees, support 20 vector machines, neural nets, deep learning and so on may allow for more 21 effective ways to model complex relationships. 22 In this essay I will describe a few of these tools for manipulating and an23 alyzing big data. I believe that these methods have a lot to offer and should 24 be more widely known and used by economists. In fact, my standard advice 25 to graduate students these days is “go to the computer science department 26 and take a class in machine learning.” There have been very fruitful collabo27 rations between computer scientists and statisticians in the last decade or so, 28 and I expect collaborations between computer scientists and econometricians 29 will also be productive in the future. 30 1 Tools to manipulate big data 31 Economists have historically dealt with data that fits in a spreadsheet, but 32 that is changing as new more detailed data becomes available; see Einav 33 and Levin [2013] for several examples and discussion. If you have more 34 than a million or so rows in a spreadsheet, you probably want to store it in a 35 relational database, such as MySQL. Relational databases offer a flexible way 36 to store, manipulate and retrieve data using a Structured Query Language 37 (SQL) which is easy to learn and very useful for dealing with medium-sized 38 data sets. 39 However, if you have several gigabytes of data or several million observa40 tions, standard relational databases become unwieldy. Databases to manage 41 data of this size are generically known as “NoSQL” databases. The term is 42 used rather loosely, but is sometimes interpreted as meaning “not only SQL.” 43 NoSQL databases are more primitive than SQL databases in terms of data 44 manipulation capabilities but can handle larger amounts of data. 45 Due to the rise of computer mediated transactions, many companies have 46 found it necessary to develop systems to process billions of transactions per 47

This research concentrates upon predictive analysis of enrolled pupil using forecasting based on data mining technique. The Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining Add-ins Excel 2007 was employed as a software mining tool for predicting enrollment of pupils. The time series algorithm was used for experiment analysis. U-DISE (Unified District Information System for Education) Dataset of Aurangabad district in Maharashtra (India) was obtained from SSA (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan) and was used for analysis. Data mining for primary pupil enrollment research provides a feasible way to analyze the trend and to addresses the interest of pupil. The dataset was studied and analyzed to forecast registered pupils in government for upcoming years. We conclude that for upcoming year, pupil strength in government school will be dropped down and number of teachers will be supersizing in the said district. Keywords— Data mining, Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining Add-ins Excel 2007, Time series algorithm, U-DISE

ABSTRACT In this paper, we extend the tradition association rule problem by allowing a weight to be associated with each item in a transaction, to re ect interest/intensity of the item within the transaction. This provides us in turn with an opportunity to associate a weight parameter with each item in the resulting association rule. We call it weighted association rule (WAR). WAR not only improves the con dence of the rules, but also provides a mechanism to do more effective target marketing by identifying or segmenting customers based on their potential degree of loyalty or volume of purchases. Our approach mines WARs by rst ignoring the weight and nding the frequent itemsets (via a traditional frequent itemset discovery algorithm), and is followed by introducing the weight during the rule generation. It is shown by experimental results that our approach not only results in shorter average execution times, but also produces higher quality results than the generalization of previous known methods on quantitative association rules.

This study focuses on predicting demand based on data collected which spans across many periods. To help our client build a solution to forecast demand effectively, we developed a model using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks, a type of Recurrent Neural Network, to estimate demand based on historical patterns. While there may be many available models for dealing with a time series problem, the LSTM model is relatively new and highly sophisticated to its counterpart. By comparing this study which works excellently for sequential learning, to the other existing models and techniques, we are now closer to solving at least one of many complications apparent across industries. The study becomes even more important for supply chain professionals, especially those in the purchase department, as they can now rely on a highly accurate model instead of basing their forecasts purely on intuition and recent customer behavior. Using data from the M3-Competition, which is a competition conducted by the International Institute of Forecasters, we develop a working framework to help our client compare their existing models (feedforward neural network and exponential smoothing model) with our LSTM model.

We study the economic benefits from using credit scoring models. We contribute to the literature by relating the discriminatory power of a credit scoring model to the optimal credit decision. Given the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, we derive a) the profit-maximizing cutoff and b) the pricing curve. Using these two concepts and a mixture thereof, we study a stylized loan market model with banks differing in the quality of their credit scoring model. Even for small quality differences, the variation in profitability among lenders is large and economically significant. We end our analysis by quantifying the impact on profits when information leaks from a competitor’s scoring model into the market. JEL Classification Codes: D40, G21, H81

While the importance of customer loyalty has been recognized in the marketing literature for at least three decades, the conceptualization and empirical validation of a customer loyalty model for e-service context has not been addressed. This paper describes a theoretical model for investigating the three main antecedent influences on loyalty (attitudinal commitment and behavioral loyalty) for e-service context: trust, customer satisfaction, and perceived value. Based on the theoretical model, a comprehensive set of hypotheses were formulated and a methodology for testing them was outlined. These hypotheses were tested empirically to demonstrate the applicability of the theoretical model. The results indicate that trust, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and commitment are separate constructs that combine to determine the loyalty, with commitment exerting a stronger influence than trust, customer satisfaction, and perceived value. Customer satisfaction and perceived value were also indirectly related to loyalty through commitment. Finally, the authors discuss the managerial and theoretical implications of these results.


Question: Predictive customer response modeling for direct marketing decision support.

In this comprehensive guide, we delve into advanced data mining techniques that offer significant advantages in managing complex data sets, often characterized by uncertainty and intricacy that traditional methods such as logistic regression, neural networks, and decision trees struggle to handle effectively. Acknowledging the unique strengths of neural networks in complex data scenarios, we explore a range of contemporary methods through simple examples, real-world applications, and comparative evaluations, aiming to equip readers with a solid foundation in data mining principles and their practical implications in business intelligence.

Structured into three distinct sections, this guide first introduces foundational concepts in data mining, followed by an in-depth exploration of various data mining techniques. The final section focuses on the business applications of these techniques, demonstrating their real-world impact. The sequence and selection of chapters can be tailored to the instructor's preference, offering flexibility in educational settings.

Supplementing theoretical knowledge, the guide includes practical case studies illustrating the application of data mining concepts in real-life scenarios. A collection of representative data sets is provided to facilitate hands-on learning and the demonstration of specific methods. Additionally, readers are directed to relevant data mining software and resources, such as www.kdnuggets.com, for further exploration.

Chapter 1 offers an introductory overview of data mining, detailing the data mining process and highlighting key business applications. Chapter 2 expands on the data mining process, using a typical data set for demonstration and emphasizing the importance of data visualization. Chapter 3 explores memory-based reasoning methods, presenting major real-world applications and algorithms through prototypical data based on real scenarios.

Chapter 4 focuses on association rule methods, particularly in the context of market basket analysis, using a real data set to illustrate the application of association rule methods. Chapter 5 introduces fuzzy data mining approaches, discussing fuzzy decision tree methods and fuzzy association rule applications, with a focus on real-world data mining examples. The guide continues with additional chapters, each dedicated to specific data mining techniques and their business applications, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of advanced data mining methodologies and their practical utility.

This paper investigates the methods for learning Bayesian belief network (BN) based predictive models for classification. Our primary interests are in the unrestricted Bayesian network and Bayesian multi-net based classifiers. We present our algorithms for learning these classifiers and also the methods for fighting the overfitting problem. A natural method for feature subset selection is also studied. Using a set of standard classification problems, we empirically evaluate the performance of various BN based classifiers. The results show that the proposed BN and Bayes multi-net classifiers are competitive with (or superior to) the best known classifiers, based on both BN and other formalisms; and that the computational time for learning and using these classifiers is relatively small. We also briefly introduce our BN classifier learning system – BN PowerPredictor. We argue that BN based classifiers deserve more attention in the data mining community.

E-commerce offers many online marketing opportunities to companies worldwide and along with high rapid growth of online shopping; it has impressed many retailers to sell products and services through online channel to expand their market. Online shopping or marketing is the use of technology (i.e., computer, internet) for better marketing performance. And retailers are mixing strategies to meet the demand of online shoppers; they are busy in studying consumer in the field of online shopping, to see the consumer attitudes towards online shopping and specifically studying the factors influencing consumers to shop online. In this study, the multiple regression analysis was employed to measure the relationship between 9 independent variables and receptivity to online shopping. The score of Beta weight presented that all 9 independent variables had positive statistical significant effect to Internet users to accept online shopping. Among the 9 factors, the strongest influencers from highest to lowest were Price, Refund, Convenience, Auction websites, Security, Brand, Search engines, Promotion and Online shopping malls. According to independent t-test analysis for gender, there was significant different means between males and females for online shopping malls and Auctions websites factors to receptivity on online shopping. The means of female significant higher than male for these two factors. This study might contribute not only to a better understanding on what and how strongly the factors are involved in online consumer purchasing decisions but also this study provides e-retailer’s standpoint such the effectively manage and recommendations. However, eretailers should keep in mind that consumer behavior might change in time to time especially in online market so the e-retailer should investigate the consumer behavior in time to time and adapt the products and services to serve as the customer requirements.

In recent years the amount of data stored in educational database is growing rapidly. The stored database contains hidden information which if used aids improvement of student's performance and behaviour. In this paper predictive modelling approach is used for extracting this hidden information. Data is collected, a predictive model is formulated, predictions are made, and the model is validated as additional data becomes available. The predictive models will help the instructor to understand how well or how poorly the students in his/her class will perform, and hence the instructor can choose proper pedagogical and instructional interventions to enhance student learning outcomes. The implementation is done in Hadoop framework with MapReduce and Revolutionary R Enterprise RRE.

The main objective of this study is to create a fast, easy and an efficient algorithm for disease prediction , with less error rate and can apply with even large data sets and show reasonable patterns with dependent variables. For disease identification and prediction in data mining a new hybrid algorithm was constructed. The Disease Identification and Prediction(DIP) algorithm, which is the combination of decision tree and association rule is used to predict the chances of some of the disease hits in some particular areas. It also shows the relationship between different parameters for the prediction. To implement this algorithm using vb.net software was also developed.

s Association rule mining identifies the remarkable association or relationship between a large set of data items. With huge quantity of data constantly being obtained and stored in databases, several industries are becoming concerned in mining association rules from their databases. For example, the detection of interesting association relationships between large quantities of business transaction data can assist in catalog design, cross-marketing, lossleader analysis, and various business decision making processes. A typical example of association rule mining is market basket analysis. This method examines customer buying patterns by identifying associations among various items that customers place in their shopping baskets. The identification of such associations can assist retailers expand marketing strategies by gaining insight into which items are frequently purchased jointly by customers. It is helpful to examine the customer purchasing behavior and assists in increasing the sales and conserve inventory by focusing on the point of sale transaction data. This work acts as a broad area for the researchers to develop a better data mining algorithm. This paper presents a survey about the existing data mining algorithm for market basket analysis. Keyewords : Association Rule Mining, Apriori Algorithm, Market Basket Analysis GJCST Classification : H.2.8 A Survey on Data Mining Algorithm for Market Basket Analysis Strictly as per the compliance and regulations of: Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology Volume 11 Issue 11 Version 1.0 July 2011 Type: Double Blind Peer Reviewed International Research Journal Publisher: Global Journals Inc. (USA) Online ISSN: 0975-4172 & Print ISSN: 0975-4350

Nowadays, a prosperity of electronic commerce (E-commerce) not only gives more convenience to consumers but brings more new opportunities in online advertising and marketing. Online advertisers can understand more about consumer preferences based on their daily online shopping and browsing behaviors. The development of big data and cloud computing techniques further empower advertisers and marketers to have a data-driven and consumer-specific preference recommendation based on the online browsing histories. In this research, a decision support system is proposed to predict a consumer purchase intention during browsing sessions. The proposed decision support system categorizes online browsing activities into purchase-oriented and general sessions using extreme boosting machines. With the browsing content entropy features, the proposed method achieves 41.81% recall and 34.35% F score. It further shows its strong predictive capability compared to other benchmark algorithms including logistic regression and traditional ensemble models. The proposed method can be implemented in real-time bidding algorithms for online advertising strategies. Ad deliveries on browsing session with potential purchase intention not only improve the effectiveness of advertisements but significantly increase last-touch attributions for campaign performance.

This paper presents a novel framework for predicting stock trends and making financial trading decisions based on a combination of data and text mining techniques. The prediction models of the proposed system are based on the textual content of time-stamped Web documents in addition to traditional numerical time series data, which is also available from the Web. The financial trading system based on the model predictions (ADMIRAL) is using three different trading strategies. In this paper, the ADMIRAL system is simulated and evaluated on real-world series of news stories and stocks data using the C4.5 decision tree induction algorithm. The main performance measures are the predictive accuracy of the induced models and, more importantly, the profitability of each trading strategy using these predictions

W e illuminate the myriad of opportunities for research where supply chain management (SCM) intersects with data science, predictive analytics, and big data, collectively referred to as DPB. We show that these terms are not only becoming popular but are also relevant to supply chain research and education. Data science requires both domain knowledge and a broad set of quantitative skills, but there is a dearth of literature on the topic and many questions. We call for research on skills that are needed by SCM data scientists and discuss how such skills and domain knowledge affect the effectiveness of an SCM data scientist. Such knowledge is crucial to develop future supply chain leaders. We propose definitions of data science and predictive analytics as applied to SCM. We examine possible applications of DPB in practice and provide examples of research questions from these applications, as well as examples of research questions employing DPB that stem from management theories. Finally, we propose specific steps interested researchers can take to respond to our call for research on the intersection of SCM and DPB.

We study the economic benefits from using credit scoring models. We contribute to the literature by relating the discriminatory power of a credit scoring model to the optimal credit decision. Given the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, we derive a) the profit-maximizing cutoff and b) the pricing curve. Using these two concepts and a mixture thereof, we study a stylized loan market model with banks differing in the quality of their credit scoring model. Even for small quality differences, the variation in profitability among lenders is large and economically significant. We end our analysis by quantifying the impact on profits when information leaks from a competitor’s scoring model into the market. JEL Classification Codes: D40, G21, H81

ABSTRACT In this paper, we extend the tradition association rule problem by allowing a weight to be associated with each item in a transaction, to re ect interest/intensity of the item within the transaction. This provides us in turn with an opportunity to associate a weight parameter with each item in the resulting association rule. We call it weighted association rule (WAR). WAR not only improves the con dence of the rules, but also provides a mechanism to do more effective target marketing by identifying or segmenting customers based on their potential degree of loyalty or volume of purchases. Our approach mines WARs by rst ignoring the weight and nding the frequent itemsets (via a traditional frequent itemset discovery algorithm), and is followed by introducing the weight during the rule generation. It is shown by experimental results that our approach not only results in shorter average execution times, but also produces higher quality results than the generalization of previous known methods on quantitative association rules.


Question: Predictive customer response modeling for decision support in direct marketing strategies.

This paper delves into the application of Bayesian network classifiers to ascertain the trajectory of customer spending over the lifecycle, particularly for those with a long-term engagement. The significance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is underscored by the widely recognized fact that the cost of acquiring new customers far outweighs the expenses associated with retaining existing ones and promoting additional purchases. As a result, contemporary marketing strategies often prioritize customer retention. However, recent research in relationship marketing has highlighted significant disparities among long-term customers in terms of their spending patterns and their evolution over time. In light of this, the present study introduces a metric to forecast a customer's future spending trend, aiming to enhance decision-making in relationship marketing. Specifically, the research focuses on predicting whether a recently acquired customer is likely to augment or diminish their spending in the future, based solely on their initial purchase data. This prediction challenge is framed as a classification problem. The primary contribution of this study is its comparative assessment of various Bayesian network classifiers alongside traditional statistical methods and other artificial intelligence techniques. The evaluation is conducted in the context of a binary classification task, aimed at categorizing customers according to their predicted spending behavior. Notably, certain Bayesian network classifiers have recently garnered attention in the field of artificial intelligence for their potential in addressing complex classification problems.

The ability to accurately predict an impending hard disk failure is important for reliable storage system design. The facility provided by most hard drive manufacturers, called S.M.A.R.T. (selfmonitoring, analysis and reporting technology), has been shown by current research to have poor predictive value. The problem of finding alternatives to S.M.A.R.T. for predicting disk failure is an area of active research. In this paper, we present a rule discovery methodology, and show that it is possible to construct decision support systems that can detect such failures using information recorded in the AutoSupport database. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by evaluating it on disks that were returned to NetApp from the field. Our evaluation shows that our system can be tuned either to have a high failure detection rate (i.e., classify a bad disk as bad) or to have a low false alarm rate (i.e., not classify a good disk as bad). Further, our rule-based classifier generates rules that are intuitive and easy to understand, unlike black box techniques.

As an important part of the Internet economy, online markets have gained much interest in research community as well as industry. Researchers have studied various aspects of online markets including motivations of consumer behaviors on online markets. However, due to the lack of log data of consumers' online behaviors including their purchase, it has not been thoroughly investigated or validated on what drives consumers to purchase products on online markets. Our research moves forward from prior studies by analyzing consumers' actual online behaviors that lead to actual purchases, and using datasets from multiple online shopping sites that can provide comparisons across different types of online shopping sites. We analyzed consumers' buying process and constructed consumers' behavior trajectory to gain deeper understanding of consumer behaviors on online markets. We find that a substantial portion (24%) of consumers in a general-purpose marketplace (like eBay) discover items from external sources (e.g., price comparison sites), while most (>95%) of consumers in a special-purpose shopping site directly access items from the site itself. We also reveal that item browsing patterns and cart usage patterns are the important predictors of the actual purchases. Using behavioral features identified by our analysis, we developed a prediction model to infer whether a consumer purchases item(s). Our prediction model of purchases achieved over 80% accuracy across four different online shopping sites.

This paper compares the accuracy of decision tree and Bayesian network algorithms for predicting the academic performance of undergraduate and postgraduate students at two very different academic institutes: Can Tho University (CTU), a large national university in Viet Nam; and the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), a small international postgraduate institute in Thailand that draws students from 86 different countries. Although the diversity of these two student populations is very different, the data-mining tools were able to achieve similar levels of accuracy for predicting student performance: 73/71% for {fail, fair, good, very good} and 94/93% for {fail, pass} at the CTU/AIT respectively. These predictions are most useful for identifying and assisting failing students at CTU (64% accurate), and for selecting very good students for scholarships at the AIT (82% accurate). In this analysis, the decision tree was consistently 3-12% more accurate than the Bayesian network. The results of these case studies give insight into techniques for accurately predicting student performance, compare the accuracy of data mining algorithms, and demonstrate the maturity of open source tools.

The growing forces of increasing global competition, continuing customer demands, and the significant revolution in Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) solutions, especially Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, have together put pressure upon many organisations to implement CRM solutions and to switch their organisational processes from being product-centric to being customer-centric. A CRM initiative is not only technology; it is a business strategy supported by technology which automates and enhances the processes associated with managing customer relationships. By the end of 2010, it is predicted that companies will be spending almost $11 billion yearly on CRM solutions. However, studies have found that 70% of CRM projects have failed. Understanding the factors that enable success of CRM is vital. There is very few existing specific research into Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of CRM implementations, and there is no comprehensive view that captures all the aspects for successful CRM implementation and their inter-relationships. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the current literature base of CSFs for CRM implementations and proposes a taxonomy for them. Future research work will continue to investigate in depth these factors by exploring the complex system links between CSFs using systems thinking techniques such as causal maps to investigate the complex, systemic networks of CSFs in organisations which result in emergent effects which themselves influence the failure or success of a CRM.

Prepaid customers in mobile telecommunications are not bound by a contract and can therefore change operators (‘churn’) at their convenience and without notification. This makes the task of predicting prepaid churn both challenging and financially rewarding. This paper presents an explorative, real world study of prepaid churn modeling by varying the experimental setup on three dimensions: data, outcome definition and population sample. Firstly, we add Customer Experience Management (CEM) data to data traditionally used for prepaid churn prediction. Secondly, we vary the outcome definition of prepaid churn. Thirdly, we alter the sample of the customers included, based on their inactivity period at the time of recording. While adding CEM parameters did not influence the predictability of churn, one variation on the sample and especially a particular change in the outcome definition had a substantial

The escalation and convergence of distributed networks and wireless telecommunications has created a tremendous potential platform for providing business services. In consumer markets, mobile marketing is expected to be a key growth area. The immediacy, interactivity and mobility of wireless devices provide a novel platform for marketing. The personal and ubiquitous nature of devices means that interactivity can be provided anytime and anywhere. However, as experience has shown, it is important to keep the consumer in mind. Mobile marketing permission and acceptance are core issues that marketers have yet to fully explain or resolve. This paper provides direction in this area. After briefly discussing some background on mobile marketing, the paper conceptualises key characteristics for mobile marketing permission and acceptance. The paper concludes with predictions on the future of mobile marketing and some core areas of further research.

Customer churn prediction has gathered greater interest in business especially in telecommunications industries. Many authors have presented different versions of the churn prediction models greatly based on the data mining concepts employing the machine learning and meta-heuristic algorithms. This aim of this paper is to study some of the most important churn prediction techniques developed over the recent years. The primary objective is on the churn in telecom industries to accurately estimate the customer survival and customer hazard functions to gain the complete knowledge of churn over the customer tenure. Another objective is the identification of the customers who are at the blink of churn and approximating the time they will churn. This paper focuses on analyzing the churn prediction techniques to identify the churn behavior and validate the reasons for customer churn. This paper summarizes the churn prediction techniques in order to have a deeper understanding of the customer churn and it shows that most accurate churn prediction is given by the hybrid models rather than single algorithms so that telecom industries become aware of the needs of high risk customers and enhance their services to overturn the churn decision.

Nowadays, a prosperity of electronic commerce (E-commerce) not only gives more convenience to consumers but brings more new opportunities in online advertising and marketing. Online advertisers can understand more about consumer preferences based on their daily online shopping and browsing behaviors. The development of big data and cloud computing techniques further empower advertisers and marketers to have a data-driven and consumer-specific preference recommendation based on the online browsing histories. In this research, a decision support system is proposed to predict a consumer purchase intention during browsing sessions. The proposed decision support system categorizes online browsing activities into purchase-oriented and general sessions using extreme boosting machines. With the browsing content entropy features, the proposed method achieves 41.81% recall and 34.35% F score. It further shows its strong predictive capability compared to other benchmark algorithms including logistic regression and traditional ensemble models. The proposed method can be implemented in real-time bidding algorithms for online advertising strategies. Ad deliveries on browsing session with potential purchase intention not only improve the effectiveness of advertisements but significantly increase last-touch attributions for campaign performance.

Conversion prediction and click prediction are two important and intertwined problems in display advertising, but existing approaches usually look at them in isolation. In this paper, we aim to predict the conversion response of users by jointly examining the past purchase behavior and the click response behavior. Additionally, we model the temporal dynamics between the click response and purchase activity into a unified framework. In particular, a novel matrix factorization approach named dynamic collective matrix factorization (DCMF) is proposed to address this problem. Our model considers temporal dynamics of post-click conversions and also takes advantages of the side information of users, advertisements, and items. Experiments on a real-world marketing dataset show that our model achieves significant improvements over several baselines.

The prediction of survival of Coronary heart disease (CHD) has been a challenging research problem for medical society. The goal of this paper is to develop data mining algorithms for predicting survival of CHD patients based on 1000 cases .We carry out a clinical observation and a 6-month follow up to include 1000 CHD cases. The survival information of each case is obtained via follow up. Based on the data, we employed three popular data mining algorithms to develop the prediction models using the 502 cases. We also used 10-fold cross-validation methods to measure the unbiased estimate of the three prediction models for performance comparison purposes. The results indicated that the SVM is the best predictor with 92.1 % accuracy on the holdout sample artificial neural networks came out to be the second with91.0% accuracy and the decision trees models came out to be the worst of the three with 89.6% accuracy. The comparative study of multiple prediction models for survival of CHD patients along with a 10-fold cross-validation provided us with an insight into the relative prediction ability of different data.


Question: An energy-efficient middleware solution for computation offloading in real-time embedded systems.

This comprehensive review explores the landscape of computation offloading for mobile devices, which are often constrained by limited resources such as battery power, network bandwidth, storage space, and computational capabilities. Computation offloading, the process of transferring computationally intensive tasks to more powerful servers and retrieving the results, has emerged as a solution to mitigate these limitations. Over the past ten years, a significant body of research has been dedicated to addressing the challenges and opportunities associated with offloading. This paper not only synthesizes the foundational concepts, methodologies, and systems developed in this field but also identifies promising avenues for future exploration. By summarizing the state of the art in computation offloading, this review aims to guide researchers and practitioners in understanding the intricacies of this technique and its potential applications in enhancing the efficiency and performance of mobile systems.

Many visions of the future include people immersed in an environment surrounded by sensors and intelligent devices, which use smart infrastructures to improve the quality of life and safety in emergency situations. Ubiquitous communication enables these sensors or intelligent devices to communicate with each other and the user or a decision maker by means of ad hoc wireless networking. Organization and optimization of network resources are essential to provide ubiquitous communication for a longer duration in large-scale networks and are helpful to migrate intelligence from higher and remote levels to lower and local levels. In this paper, distributed energy-efficient deployment algorithms for mobile sensors and intelligent devices that form an Ambient Intelligent network are proposed. These algorithms employ a synergistic combination of cluster structuring and a peer-to-peer deployment scheme. An energy-efficient deployment algorithm based on Voronoi diagrams is also proposed here. Performance of our algorithms is evaluated in terms of coverage, uniformity, and time and distance traveled until the algorithm converges. Our algorithms are shown to exhibit excellent performance.

We propose a modeling framework for performing schedulability analysis by using Uppaal real-time model-checker [2]. The framework is inspired by a case study where schedulability analysis of a satellite system is performed. The framework assumes a single CPU hardware where a fixed priority preemptive scheduler is used in a combination with two resource sharing protocols and in addition voluntary task suspension is considered. The contributions include the modeling framework, its application on an industrial case study and a comparison of results with classical response time analysis.

Software development for smart cities bring into light new concerns, such as how to deal with scalability, heterogeneity (sensors, actuators, high performance computing devices, etc.), geolocation information or privacy issues, among some. Traditional approaches to distributed systems fail to address these challenges, because they were mainly devoted to enterprise IT environments. This paper proposes a middleware framework, called Civitas, specially devoted to support the task of service development for the Smart City paradigm. This paper also analyzes the main drawbacks of traditional approaches to middleware service development and how these are overcome in the middleware framework proposed here.

The constraint of energy consumption is a serious problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this regard, many solutions for this problem have been proposed in recent years. In one line of research, scholars suggest data driven approaches to help conserve energy by reducing the amount of required communication in the network. This paper is an attempt in this area and proposes that sensors be powered on intermittently. A neural network will then simulate sensors’ data during their idle periods. The success of this method relies heavily on a high correlation between the points making a time series of sensed data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the idea, we conduct a number of experiments. In doing so, we train a NAR network against various datasets of sensed humidity and temperature in different environments. By testing on actual data, it is shown that the predictions by the device greatly obviate the need for sensed data during sensors’ idle periods and save over 65 percent of energy.

We introduce ROC, a Rank-switching, Open-row Controller for Double Data Rate Dynamic RAM (DDR DRAM). ROC is optimized for mixed-criticality multicore systems using modern DDR devices: compared to existing real-time memory controllers, it provides significantly lower worst case latency bounds for hard real-time tasks and supports throughput-oriented optimizations for soft real-time applications. The key to improved performance is an innovative rank-switching mechanism which hides the latency of write-read transitions in DRAM devices without requiring unpredictable request reordering. We further employ open row policy to take advantage of the data caching mechanism (row buffering) in each device. ROC provides complete timing isolation between hard and soft tasks and allows for compositional timing analysis over the number of cores and memory ranks in the system. We implemented and synthesized the ROC back end in Verilog RTL, and evaluated its performance on both synthetic tasks and a set of representative benchmarks.

The last decades’ tremendous advances in wireless communications have been driven mainly by personal communications. Radio resource allocation mechanisms for optimizing key metrics, such as average throughput and delay, for such traffic are by now rather well-developed. However, with the increased interest in wireless machine-to-machine communication, e.g. for industrial control or monitoring of large-scale infrastructures, new challenges emerge. The performance of an estimator or closed-loop control system that operates over an unreliable wireless network depends on the full latency and loss distributions and not only on their averages. For these applications, more suitable performance metrics are per-packet guarantees on latency and reliability (on-time delivery). This thesis studies optimal forwarding of deadline-constrained traffic over lossy multi-hop networks. We assume a routing topology in the form of a directed graph with packet loss on links described by finite-state Markov chains, and focus on a single transient packet scenario. Two problems are considered: maximizing the probability that packets are delivered within their specified deadline; and minimizing the expected energy cost with a guaranteed probability of on-time delivery. The first problem can be formulated as a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP), while the second problem is a finite-horizon constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). A general dynamic programming framework that solves a weighted sum of reliability and energy maximization problem is proposed. The maximum deadline-constrained reliability problem is solved by studying a simplification of the general dynamic programming. The minimum energy optimal policy is a random selection between two deterministic and computable forwarding policies, each of which can be found via a dynamic programming framework. Particular instances with Bernoulli and Gilbert-Elliot loss models that admit numerically efficient solutions are discussed. Finally, we show the application of the technique for a co-design of forwarding policies and controller for wireless control. Based on the recent result on the monotonicity of the optimal control loss, the problem of minimum control loss and the problem of minimum energy cost with a guaranteed control performance can be solved optimally.

Server consolidation in cloud computing environments makes it possible for multiple servers or desktops to run on a single physical server for high resource utilization, low cost, and reduced energy consumption. However, the scheduler in the virtual machine monitor (VMM), such as Xen credit scheduler, is agnostic about the communication behavior between the guest operating systems (OS). The aforementioned behavior leads to increased network communication latency in consolidated environments. In particular, the CPU resources management has a critical impact on the network latency between co-located virtual machines (VMs) when there are CPUand I/O-intensive workloads running simultaneously. This paper presents the design and implementation of a communication-aware inter-VM scheduling (CIVSched) technique that takes into account the communication behavior between inter-VMs running on the same virtualization platform. The CIVSched technique inspects the network packets transmitted between local co-resident domains to identify the target VM and process that will receive the packets. Thereafter, the target VM and process are preferentially scheduled by the VMM and the guest OS. The cooperation of these two schedulers makes the network packets to be timely received by the target application. Experimental results on the Xen virtualization platform depict that the CIVSched technique can reduce the average response time of network traffic by approximately 19 percent for the highly consolidated environment, while keeping the inherent fairness of the VMM scheduler.

Recently, the industries converge to the integration of the industry 4.0 paradigm to keep responding to the variable market demands. This integration is realized by the adoption of several components of the industry 4.0 such as IoT, Big Data and Cloud Computing, etc. Several difficulties concerning the integration of data management were encountered during first level of Industry 4.0 integration because of the unexpected quantity of data generated by IoT devices. The Fog computing can be considered as a new component of Industry 4.0 to resolve this kind of problem. However its implementation in the industrial field faces several challenges from different natures. This paper explains the role of Fog Computing solution to enhance the Cloud layer (distribution, low latency, real-time,. . . ) and studies its ability to be implemented in manufacturing systems. The Fog Manufacturing is introduced as the new industrial Fog vision. The challenges preventing the Fog Manufacturing implementation are studied and the links between each other are justified. A future use case is described to carry out the solutions given to satisfy the Fog Manufacturing challenges.

BJÖRN B. BRANDENBURG: Scheduling and Locking in Multiprocessor Real-Time Operating Systems (Under the direction of James H. Anderson) With the widespread adoption of multicore architectures, multiprocessors are now a standard deployment platform for (soft) real-time applications. This dissertation addresses two questions fundamental to the design of multicore-ready real-time operating systems: (1) Which scheduling policies offer the greatest flexibility in satisfying temporal constraints; and (2) which locking algorithms should be used to avoid unpredictable delays? With regard to Question 1, LITMUSRT, a real-time extension of the Linux kernel, is presented and its design is discussed in detail. Notably, LITMUSRT implements link-based scheduling, a novel approach to controlling blocking due to non-preemptive sections. Each implemented scheduler (22 configurations in total) is evaluated under consideration of overheads on a 24-core Intel Xeon platform. The experiments show that partitioned earliest-deadline first (EDF) scheduling is generally preferable in a hard real-time setting, whereas global and clustered EDF scheduling are effective in a soft real-time setting. With regard to Question 2, real-time locking protocols are required to ensure that the maximum delay due priority inversion can be bounded a priori. Several spinlockand semaphore-based multiprocessor real-time locking protocols for mutual exclusion (mutex), reader-writer (RW) exclusion, and k-exclusion are proposed and analyzed. A new category of RW locks suited to worst-case analysis, termed phase-fair locks, is proposed and three efficient phase-fair spinlock implementations are provided (one with few atomic operations, one with low space requirements, and one with constant RMR complexity). Maximum priority-inversion blocking is proposed as a natural complexity measure for semaphore protocols. It is shown that there are two classes of schedulability analysis, namely suspensionoblivious and suspension-aware analysis, that yield two different lower bounds on blocking. Five

Datacenter-based Cloud Computing services provide a flexible, scalable and yet economical infrastructure to host online services such as multimedia streaming, email and bulk storage. Many such services perform geo-replication to provide necessary quality of service and reliability to users resulting in frequent large inter-datacenter transfers. In order to meet tenant service level agreements (SLAs), these transfers have to be completed prior to a deadline. In addition, WAN resources are quite scarce and costly, meaning they should be fully utilized. Several recently proposed schemes, such as B4 [1], TEMPUS [2], and SWAN [3] have focused on improving the utilization of inter-datacenter transfers through centralized scheduling, however, they fail to provide a mechanism to guarantee that admitted requests meet their deadlines. Also, in a recent study, authors propose Amoeba [4], a system that allows tenants to define deadlines and guarantees that the specified deadlines are met, however, to admit new traffic, the proposed system has to modify the allocation of already admitted transfers. In this paper, we propose Rapid Close to Deadline Scheduling (RCD), a close to deadline traffic allocation technique that is fast and efficient. Through simulations, we show that RCD is up to 15 times faster than Amoeba, provides high link utilization along with deadline guarantees, and is able to make quick decisions on whether a new request can be fully satisfied before its deadline.


Question: An energy-efficient middleware solution for computation offloading in real-time embedded systems.

This document introduces an innovative solution, the Adaptive Computation Offloading (ACO) framework, designed to overcome the processing and power constraints of mobile devices by leveraging remote computing resources. Mobile devices, such as smartphones, often struggle with executing resource-intensive tasks like video analysis or 3D modeling due to their limited computational capabilities and battery life. The ACO framework addresses this challenge by offloading complex computations from mobile devices to a cloud infrastructure or nearby idle computers. A key feature of the ACO framework is its Mobile Augmentation Cloud Services (MACS) middleware, which facilitates the seamless extension of Android application execution from the mobile device to the cloud. Developers can continue to use the standard Android development tools, as the middleware handles the critical tasks of adaptive application partitioning, resource monitoring, and computation offloading. This results in elastic mobile applications that can run natively on the device or tap into remote computing resources without user intervention. The effectiveness of the ACO framework is demonstrated through two prototype applications, showcasing significant energy savings (up to 95%) and performance enhancements when compared to local execution alone. These findings highlight the potential of ACO in enabling mobile devices to handle complex tasks more efficiently and with greater energy efficiency.

In this paper, we advocate Crowdlet, a novel self-organized mobile crowdsourcing paradigm, in which a mobile task requester can proactively exploit a massive crowd of encountered mobile workers at real-time for quick and high-quality results. We present a comprehensive system model of Crowdlet that defines task, worker arrival and worker ability models. Further, we introduce a service quality concept to indicate the expected service gain that a requester can enjoy when he recruits an encountered worker, by jointly taking into account worker ability, real-timeness and task reward. Based on the models, we formulate an online worker recruitment problem to maximize the expected sum of service quality. We derive an optimal worker recruitment policy through the dynamic programming principle, and show that it exhibits a nice threshold based structure. We conduct extensive performance evaluation based on real traces, and numerical results demonstrate that our policy can achieve superior performance and improve more than 30% performance gain over classic policies. Besides, our Android prototype shows that Crowdlet is cost-efficient, requiring less than 7 seconds and 6 Joule in terms of time and energy cost for policy computation in most cases.

Fog computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage and application services to end users. In this article, we elaborate the motivation and advantages of Fog computing and analyse its applications in a series of real scenarios, such as Smart Grid, smart traffic lights in vehicular networks and software defined networks. We discuss the state of the art of Fog computing and similar work under the same umbrella. Distinguished from other reviewing work of Fog computing, this paper further discloses the security and privacy issues according to current Fog computing paradigm. As an example, we study a typical attack, man-in-the-middle attack, for the discussion of system security in Fog computing. We investigate the stealthy features of this attack by examining its CPU and memory consumption on Fog device. In addition, we discuss the authentication and authorization techniques that can be used in Fog computing. An example of authentication techniques is introduced to address the security scenario where the connection between Fog and Cloud is fragile. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The advantages of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with respect to traditional methods for visual pattern recognition have changed the field of machine vision. The main issue that hinders broad adoption of this technique is the massive computing workload in CNN that prevents real-time implementation on low-power embedded platforms. Recently, several dedicated solutions have been proposed to improve the energy efficiency and throughput, nevertheless the huge amount of data transfer involved in the processing is still a challenging issue. This work proposes a new CNN accelerator exploiting a novel memory access scheme which significantly improves data locality in CNN related processing. With this scheme, external memory access is reduced by 50% while achieving similar or even better throughput. The accelerator is implemented using 28nm CMOS technology. Implementation results show that the accelerator achieves a performance of 102GOp/s @800MHz while consuming 0.303mm2 in silicon area. Power simulation shows that the dynamic power of the accelerator is 68mW. Its flexibility is demonstrated by running various different CNN benchmarks.

In past few years, advancement in mobile applications and their integration with Cloud computing services has introduced a new computing paradigm known as Mobile Cloud Computing. Although Cloud services support a wide range of mobile applications, access to these services suffers from several performance issues such as WAN latency, jitter, and packet losses. Cloudlet frameworks are proposed to overcome these performance issues. More specifically, Cloudlets aim to bring the Cloud or a specific part of the Cloud closer to the mobile device by utilizing proximate computing resources to perform compute-intensive tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art mobile Cloudlet architectures. We also classify the state-of-the-art Cloudlet solutions by presenting a hierarchical taxonomy. Moreover, the areas of Cloudlet applications are also identified and presented. Cloudlet discovery, resource management, data security, mobility, application offloading, and most importantly incentives to deploy a Cloudlet are areas that still needs to be investigated by the research community. The critical aspects of the current Cloudlet frameworks in Mobile Cloud Computing are analyzed to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the frameworks. The similarities and differences of the frameworks based on the important parameters, such as scalability, mobility support, Internet dependency, dynamic configuration, energy savings, and execution cost, are also investigated. The requirements for deploying the Cloudlet in a Local Wireless Network are also highlighted and presented. We also discuss open research challenges that Cloudlet deployments face in Local Wireless Networks. & 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

While cloud computing has brought paradigm shifts to computing services, researchers and developers have also found some problems inherent to its nature such as bandwidth bottleneck, communication overhead, and location blindness. The concept of fog/edge computing is therefore coined to extend the services from the core in cloud data centers to the edge of the network. In recent years, many systems are proposed to better serve ubiquitous smart devices closer to the user. This article provides a complete and up-to-date review of edge-oriented computing systems by encapsulating relevant proposals on their architecture features, management approaches, and design objectives.

This paper presents a sentry-based approach to power management in wireless sensor networks for applications such as intruder detection and tracking. To minimize average power consumption while maintaining sufficient node density for coarse sensing, nodes are partitioned dynamically into two sets: sentries and non-sentries. Sentry nodes provide sufficient coverage for continuous monitoring and basic communication services. Non-sentry nodes sleep for designated periods of time to conserve power, and switch to full power only when needed to provide more refined sensing for tracking. Non-sentry nodes check for beacons from sentry nodes to determine when they should remain on. Experimental results are presented demonstrating trade-offs between power savings and tracking performance for a network of seventeen nodes using the first implementation of a basic sentry-based power management scheme. The paper concludes with a brief description of a full set of power-management services being implemented as middle-ware for general wireless sensor applications.

Growing transistor counts, limited power budgets, and the breakdown of voltage scaling are currently conspiring to create a utilization wall that limits the fraction of a chip that can run at full speed at one time. In this regime, specialized, energy-efficient processors can increase parallelism by reducing the per-computation power requirements and allowing more computations to execute under the same power budget. To pursue this goal, this paper introduces conservation cores. Conservation cores, or c-cores, are specialized processors that focus on reducing energy and energy-delay instead of increasing performance. This focus on energy makes c-cores an excellent match for many applications that would be poor candidates for hardware acceleration (e.g., irregular integer codes). We present a toolchain for automatically synthesizing c-cores from application source code and demonstrate that they can significantly reduce energy and energy-delay for a wide range of applications. The c-cores support patching, a form of targeted reconfigurability, that allows them to adapt to new versions of the software they target. Our results show that conservation cores can reduce energy consumption by up to 16.0x for functions and by up to 2.1x for whole applications, while patching can extend the useful lifetime of individual c-cores to match that of conventional processors.

Fog computing, which distributes computing resources to multiple locations between the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the cloud, is attracting considerable attention from academia and industry. Yet, despite the excitement about the potential of fog computing, few comprehensive quantitative characteristics of the properties of fog computing architectures have been conducted. In this paper we examine the properties of task completion latencies in fog computing. First, we present the results of our empirical benchmarking-based study of task completion latencies. The study covered a range of settings, and uniquely considered both traditional and serverless fog computing execution points. It demonstrated the range of execution point characteristics in different locations and the relative stability of latency characteristics for a given location. It also highlighted properties of serverless execution that are not incorporated in existing fog computing algorithms. Second, we present a framework we developed for co-optimizing task completion quality and latency, which was inspired by the insights of our empirical study. We describe fog computing task assignment problems we formulated under this framework, and present the algorithms we developed for solving them.

The energy usage of computer systems is becoming more important, especially for battery operated systems. Displays, disks, and cpus, in that order, use the most energy. Reducing the energy used by displays and disks has been studied elsewhere; this paper considers a new method for reducing the energy used by the cpu. We introduce a new metric for cpu energy performance, millions-of-instructions-per-joule (MIPJ). We examine a class of methods to reduce MIPJ that are characterized by dynamic control of system clock speed by the operating system scheduler. Reducing clock speed alone does not reduce MIPJ, since to do the same work the system must run longer. However, a number of methods are available for reducing energy with reduced clock-speed, such as reducing the voltage [Chandrakasan et al 1992][Horowitz 1993] or using reversible [Younis and Knight 1993] or adiabatic logic [Athas et al 1994].
 What are the right scheduling algorithms for taking advantage of reduced clock-speed, especially in the presence of applications demanding ever more instructions-per-second? We consider several methods for varying the clock speed dynamically under control of the operating system, and examine the performance of these methods against workstation traces. The primary result is that by adjusting the clock speed at a fine grain, substantial CPU energy can be saved with a limited impact on performance.

This paper presents a design procedure of HardwareIn-the-Loop (HIL) for Electric Vehicle powertrain system modeling and simulation. First, simulation is performed in MATLAB/Simulink platform. Then, an Electric Vehicle Powertrain Hardware-In-the-Loop system including BMS (Battery Manage System), MCU (Motor Control Unit) and VMS (vehicle management system) is built based on the dSPACE with MATLAB/Simulink, along with the RTW toolbox (real time workshop). Through this system, the Electric Vehicle Control strategy is simulated and validated, and the results of offline simulation & real time simulation with laboratory prototype are presented. Keywords-Hardware In the Loop; Electric Vehicle; Simulation; dSPACE; DSP