Sep/Oct 2018

Antithesis of analytics

• Peter Horner

In a recent Analytics newsletter, I noted that healthcare was the top issue in at least one national poll of voters looking at the November midterm elections, ranking right up there with the economy and jobs, and ahead of immigration, taxes and guns. Of course, voters can have very different reasons for naming any one of those topics their top priority. Guns could be the No. 1 issue for those in favor of expanding gun rights or those in favor of expanding gun control.

My favorite blogs

• Vijay Mehrotra

A friend of mine – let’s call her Dana – stopped by my home office the other night. Dana works in sales for a business-to-business (B2B) software company that hosts its solution in the cloud, which makes them a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor. When I asked her how things were going at work, I thought it was a reasonably innocuous question. Instead, we ended up staying up half the night discussing how challenging it was to sell an early stage product with a sophisticated analytic engine into a competitive market.

Storms forming over healthcare technology and politics

• Rajib Ghosh

Summer is over, and we are gearing up for the second part of the year with some trepidation. Uncertainties about the healthcare industry continues unabated as new court cases are getting introduced to undermine the framework of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). According to filed court cases in Texas and 19 other states, the Justice Department wants to waive the obligation of health insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions of their members.

PubsOnLine, CAP, security, vital skills

INFORMS, the world’s largest organization for analytics professionals and the publishers of Analytics magazine, has redesigned its PubsOnLine platform to include more intuitive navigation and bold graphics, thus creating an overall more enjoyable reader experience in a completely mobile responsive environment.

INFORMS everywhere: U.S. Census Committee, queues and Kathmandu

Thomas Cook, a former president of INFORMS, a founding partner of Decision Analytics International and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, was recently named one of five new members of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC). The committee meets twice a year to address policy, research and technical issues relating to a full range of Census Bureau programs and activities, including census tests, policies and operations.

The importance of confidence scores

• Emma Duckworth

How confident are you about your modeled data? If you reply honestly, the answer to the question is likely to be akin to sticking your finger in the air and seeing which way the wind is blowing. The problem with modeled data is its very nature – it’s modeled.

Neural networks and the case for efficient modeling

• Jim Theologes

High tech companies first introduced the idea of artificial intelligence (AI) into the mainstream, and now the term is a rapidly growing part of everyday business lexicon. Within the AI space, deep learning modeling and neural networks are receiving the most attention.

2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting heading to Phoenix

“Smart City and Sustainable Communities” is the theme of the 2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting to be held Nov. 4-7 at the Phoenix Convention Center and Hyatt Regency Phoenix in the heart of downtown Phoenix. Smart cities are the new paradigm when it comes to urban sustainability.

California Climate

• Harrison Schramm

This time on the Five-Minute Analyst, we take a look at climate data from three cities in California, our home state. A lot has been said about climate and data in the popular press over the past few years. We decided to take a look at three California cities – Bakersfield, Los Angeles and Fresno – over a long period of time (Figure 1). These cities were chosen because of their geographic diversity and length of record.