Big Data, Analytics, Data-driven decisions, predictive modeling, machine learning and so on. All these terms have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. We hear about applications of neural networks or logistic regression in multiple industries even on our daily commute to work. Does this mean that we have overcome all the challenges in successful applications of analytics to solving complex business problems? Far from it!

Finding the right method or algorithm to solve a problem is often not the most challenging aspect. The bigger problems facing an Analytics group include

Data: Availability of the right kind of data

Process: Implementing the solution in operational systems

People: Bridging the talent gap resulting from lack of analytical training

This presentation will describe some of these challenges in the context of specific business problems. Addressing them will be important as opportunities for automated large scale modeling continue to grow in areas such as digital marketing, event stream processing involving sensor data, large scale forecasting in many diverse industries and many other applications.

Dr. Radhika Kulkarni is Vice President of Advanced Analytics R&D at SAS Institute Inc. She oversees software development in many analytical areas including Statistics, Operations Research, Econometrics, Forecasting and Data Mining. Her Division is also responsible for providing key components of business analytics solutions in several areas including Finance, Retail, Marketing, Hospitality and Supply Chain. Kulkarni is an active member in the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, The Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University and the Marketing Analytics and Data Mining Board at Oklahoma State University. Radhika Kulkarni has a Master’s in Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi and a Master’s and Ph.D in Operations Research from Cornell University.