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Business Analytics

Making business decisions based on data is vital to every business area.  Business analytics research explores the best techniques to model, analyze and use the large quantity of readily available data effectively. Most companies use some form of business analytics. Statistical methods are the core of many business analytics research areas such as data mining, forecasting, information system strategy, and optimization.

Faculty in the Department of Statistics at Penn State use statistical methods like Bayesian hierarchical model, dimension reduction, graphical models, latent variable models, network analysis, and variable selection to develop new methodologies to perform market segmentation, understand the dynamic evolution of consumer preferences, forecast financial time series, and measure earnings quality in accounting research. Dr. Duncan Fong’s work in marketing research has impacted model-based market segmentation and conjoint analysis, while the work of Dr. Lingzhou Xue has proposed and validated a new measure of earnings quality based on a hidden Markov model.

Faculty