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Shows how counterfactuals and machine learning methods can be used to guide exploration of large databases that addresses some of the fundamental problems that organizations face in learning from data. Discusses data mining, particularly in the financial arena; generating useful knowledge from data; and the evaluation of counterfactuals. (LRW)

We address key questions related to the explosion of interest in the emerging fields of big data, analytics, and data science. We discuss the novelty of the fields and whether [...]

Two studies of the cognitive processes involved in online document-based information retrieval were conducted. These studies led to the development of five computational models of online document retrieval which were incorporated into the design of an "intelligent" document-based retrieval system. Both the system and the broader implications of this research for information retrieval systems are discussed. (52 references) (MAB)

Sponsored search is the mechanism whereby advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (nonsponsored) web search results. Based on prior literature, we draw an [...]

How are business schools thinking about developing leaders for the emerging digital economy? Is there a set of core principles we can apply to thinking about the enabling potential of […]

In this paper, we study the problem of discovering interesting patterns in large volumes of data. Patterns can be expressed not only in terms of the database schema but also in user-defined terms, such as relational views and classification hierarchies. The user-defined terminology is stored in a data dictionary that maps it into the language of the database schema. We define a pattern as a deductive rule expressed in user-defined terms that has a degree of certainty associated with it. We present methods of discovering interesting patterns based on abstracts which are summaries of the data expressed in the language of the user.

In this paper we present a general representation for problems that can be reduced to constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) and a model for reasoning about their solution. The novel part of the model is a constraint-driven reasoner that manages a set of constraints specified in terms of arbitrarily complex Boolean expressions and represented in the form of a dependency network. This dependency network incorporates control information (derived from the syntax of the constraints) that is used for constraint propagation, contains dependency information that can be used for explanation and for dependency-directed backtracking, and is incremental in the sense that if the problem specification is modified, a new solution can be derived by modifying the existing solution. The constraint-driven reasoner is coupled to a problem solver which contains information about the problem variables and preference orderings.

We compare four nonlinear methods on their ability to learn models from data. The problem requires predicting whether a company will deliver an earnings surprise a specific number of days prior to announcement. This problem has been well studied in the literature using linear models. A basic question is whether machine learning-based nonlinear models such as tree induction algorithms, neural networks, naive Bayesian learning, and genetic algorithms perform better in terms of predictive accuracy and in uncovering interesting relationships among problem variables. Equally importantly, if these alternative approaches perform better, why? And how do they stack up relative to each other? The answers to these questions are significant for predictive modeling in the financial arena, and in general for problem domains characterized by significant nonlinearities. In this paper, we compare the four above-mentioned nonlinear methods along a number of criteria. The genetic algorithm turns out to have some advantages in finding multiple 'small disjunct' patterns that can be accurate and collectively capable of making predictions more often than its competitors. We use some of the nonlinearities we discovered about the problem domain to explain these results. Index Terms--Data mining, earnings surprise, genetic algorithms, machine learning, nonlinear systems.