Decision Science in Action

Data science   is an interdisciplinary field to extract   knowledge   or insights from   data in structured or unstructured form leading to substantive decision making. This being interdisciplinary area employs knowledge and theory from multiple fields such as statistics, mathematics, computer science and programming. Data science finds applications in diverse fields from healthcare management to politics, cyber security to genetic engineering and marketing to operations etc. Data science is playing pivotal role in academic and applied research in different domains. Leading banks and retailers of the world have been using data driven analytics for marketing promotions and risk assessments since the time when it was called analytics. In last decade data, have been used in multiple fields of business and science leading to emergence of Data Science as stream. It would not be exaggeration to state that data science is a promising career option for bright f...

Data science is one of the  most promising field for bright future.  Various Gartner reports state that most of the organisations are going to invest more strategically to use the power of analytics to drive their business decisions.  Top banks and retailers have been using the data analytics for acquiring new customers, promotional initiatives, product pricing  etc  by setting up centre of excellence in analytics in India. In last 5 years analytics profession has caught lot of attractions in the job market.  Number of institutions in India and outside India have launched academic programs including online and on campus certificate programs. Question is which program is best? I do not know but I can definitely argue that M Tech in IME at IIT Kanpur is an excellent launchpad for career in data science or analytics.There is also another M Tech program at IITB which is among top programs for data science. These are two top programs which are producing tal...

There are multiple OR packages to solve the optimization problems at academic as well as industry levels. One of the best OR packages that I am using is the SAS OR package. It has a capability to model highly complex problems and program it if required. Most of the optimization algorithms have been implemented on SAS.  In SAS we call Procedure to any function. There are many procedures which are SAS implementation of the OR algorithms. But there is a procedure called Proc Opt Model using which we can call different algorithms to solve any optimization problems. We can write  programs also inside it implement some constraints which can not be directly coded. I think this is very powerful tool for an operational research analyst. I use this procedure to model the business problems. I learnt it myself by going through user documentation. The SAS document explains clearly how can we use SAS OR packages with examples. In fact all the examples given in the HP Williams Model Buildin...

I recently worked with a cement manufacturer and a leading technology company to improve their supply chain network. Granularity of the two projects are very different. In case of cement manufacturer objective was to optimize the distribution and production planning. This was at a tactical level where as the objective of the work with technology company was at strategic level. Senior management was looking for some strategic level recommendations. But there are few things which were common such as issues with the data provided and structure of the results to be produced. Though structure of the results evolved gradually as we made progress on the project. I studied operation research during my post-graduation but was not using at my work place. These two project gave me opportunity to utilize my optimization skills to solve the business problems. While working in these projects, I learnt some new terminology as well as tactics to drive the optimization projects successfully. ...