Stephen L. France

Stephen L. France, Sanjoy Ghose

Marketing analytics is a diverse field, with both academic researchers and practitioners coming from a range of backgrounds including marketing, expert systems, statistics, and operations research. This paper provides an integrative review at the boundary of these areas. The aim is to give researchers in the intelligent and expert systems community the opportunity to gain a broad view of the marketing analytics area and provide a starting point for future interdisciplinary collaboration. The topics of visualization, segmentation, and class prediction are featured. Links between the disciplines are emphasized. For each of these topics, a historical overview is given, starting with initial work in the 1960s and carrying through to the present day. Recent innovations for modern, large, and complex "big data" sets are described. Practical implementation advice is given, along with a directory of open source R routines for implementing marketing analytics techniques.

Stephen L. France, Ulas Akkucuk

This paper gives a review and synthesis of methods of evaluating dimensionality reduction techniques. Particular attention is paid to rank-order neighborhood evaluation metrics. A framework is created for exploring dimensionality reduction quality through visualization. An associated toolkit is implemented in R. The toolkit includes scatter plots, heat maps, loess smoothing, and performance lift diagrams. The overall rationale is to help researchers compare dimensionality reduction techniques and use visual insights to help select and improve techniques. Examples are given for dimensionality reduction of manifolds and for the dimensionality reduction applied to a consumer survey dataset.