University of Connecticut

School of Business
OPIM 5671 Data Mining and Business Intelligence
Project Specification: Spring 2012 Overview Select and work on a team project (group of 4 students) that discovers interesting trends, relationships, patterns, risks, and opportunities that are often difficult to see in a basic spreadsheet analysis. The candidate project should contain a fairly large amount of data (at least several thousands observations), include many variables (such as demographic, economic, geographic with at least one dependent variable that you are interested in studying/predicting and other explanatory or independent variables), and leverage common analytics techniques such as clustering, decision tree, regressions, association, text mining, etc. It would be a plus if you can bring in other sophisticated techniques and analyses as well. The findings from the project are expected to help senior executives and managers make critical business decisions that translate to increased revenue, reduced costs, or improved efficiency of the organization.
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Suggested Projects and Topics (these serve only as ideas. They should by no means restrict your imagination) Heritage Provider Network Health Prize Competition o Description of problem, data, rules, discussion forums, leader board, etc. can be found at http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/c/hhp. KDD CUP 2012, Modeling of Microblog Data and Search Click Data (Sponsored by Tencent, China's largest Internet company) o Description of problem, data, rules, etc. can be found at http://www.kdd.org/kdd2012/kddcup.shtml Aetna Talent Management Analytics o Description of problem and data can be found on class website. Credit approval, fraud detection Financial money laundering Detect security breaches Targeted advertising Location intelligence Online recommendation systems (movies, books, etc) Social network/software usage patterns Group purchasing Channel coordination and cannibalization

Deliverables: Project proposal: A one-page description of what you plan to do for your project (Due 2/21/2012). Please include: o project title o brief description of the business problem you'll solve or the question(s) you'll investigate o what data you'll use and where you'll get it o which techniques you plan to use Please submit your proposal in a pdf format to me via email at john.zhang@business.uconn.edu. This is intended mainly as a check point to make sure you've got a workable idea and a plan for carrying it through. Hence you don't have to spend a lot of time making it beautiful, but do think seriously about what you're planning to do. It is to your benefit to define the problem and flesh out your ideas as much as possible in this proposal. Final project white paper (6 pages, single spaced, 12 point font size) due March 24 by 7:00pm. This is a comprehensive description of your project. You should include the following: o executive summary of the project o project ideas o your data sets as well as what steps you took to pre-process the data o your specific implementation techniques o key results, metrics, take-aways of your project o what worked, what did not work, what surprised you, and why Final presentation: In the last day of class (March 10, 2012), each team needs to make a presentation of the project to the rest of the class as well as some individuals that I might invite. The presentation should last no more than 15 minutes with a brief Q/A session.

Feel free to discuss your project with me during the semester or class.