Data Mining for Business Application

Speaker:	Raymond Chi-Wing WONG
		Department of Computer Science and Engineering
		The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title:		"Data Mining for Business Application"

Date:		Monday, 3 March 2008

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lifts 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

In many business applications, data mining can be regarded as a strategy
to understand the past experience which can be used to predict future
events for decision-making. For example, in customer-centric applications,
understanding customer behavior can help companies to improve their
services and thus enhance their competitive position in the market. Most
research works about data mining focus on finding different "patterns"
which can help the process of decision-making. However, it is generally
true that the patterns in themselves do not serve the end purpose of the
business people. We believe that the patterns can aid in more specific
targets. In this talk, we investigate how association rules, one of
popular patterns in the literature of data mining, can be used to help
companies for decision-making in applications of inventory control and
marketing. More specifically, maximal-profit item selection with
cross-selling effect (MPIS) problem is investigated. Given a set of items
in the company, the problem is about selecting a subset of items which can
give the maximal profit with the consideration of cross-selling. We prove
that a simple version of this problem is NP-hard. We propose a new
approach to the problem with the consideration of the loss rule - a kind
of association rules to model the cross-selling effect. We show that the
problem can be transformed to a quadratic programming problem. In case
quadratic programming is not applicable, we also propose a heuristics
approach. Besides, we propose an evolutionary approach - genetic algorithm
- to tackle this problem.

************************
Biography:

Raymond Chi-Wing WONG received the BSc and MPhil degrees in computer
science and engineering in the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2002 and
2004, respectively. In 2005-2006, he worked as a research assistant at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University. Since Aug 2005,
he has been a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering in the
Chinese University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Prof. Ada Fu. The
expected date of his graduation is the summer in 2008. His research
interests include data mining, database, security, video compression and
computer music.

>From May 2006 to Aug 2006, he was a visiting student of Prof. Jian Pei and
Prof. Ke Wang at Simon Fraser University in Canada. From Aug 2007 to Sept
2007, he visited IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as a summer intern under
the supervision of Prof. Philip S. Yu. Some of his collaborators are Prof.
Ada Fu, Prof. Ke Wang, Prof. Jian Pei, Prof. Philip S. Yu, Prof. Eamonn
Keogh, Prof. Yufei Tao, Prof. Jiuyong Li and Prof. Oscar Au.

He received more than 15 awards. Within 5 years, he published more than 15
conference papers (e.g., SIGKDD, VLDB and ICDM) and more than 5
journal/chapter papers (e.g., DAMI, TKDE and VLDB journal). He reviewed
papers from conferences and journals related to data mining and database,
including VLDB conference, VLDB Journal, TKDE, ICDE, SIGKDD, ICDM, DAMI,
DaWaK, PAKDD, EDBT and IJDWM. He also gave presentations in international
conferences such as VLDB07, SIGKDD07, SIGKDD06, ICDM05, SDM05, PAKDD04 and
ICDM03.