Prabandhan (Pragyan) - Analytics in todays world, Ms Sridevi Vadapalli, Senior Practice Lead, Infosys

Pragyan- the guest lecture series of the IME Department, IIT Kanpur, organised under the umbrella of Prabandhan’16, witnessed an array of informative seminars delivered by some of the greatest personalities from all over India. One of the guest lectures on ‘Analytics in today’s world’ was delivered by Ms. Sridevi Vadapalli, an M.Sc in Statistics from the University of Hyderabad and having around 15 years of experience in analytics across industries like BFSI, Retail / CPG and manufacturing. Her experience includes indulgence in industries like Text mining, Market basket analysis, Cross sell, Upsell, Churn model, Web analytics etc. She presently heads customer and marketing analytics and operational analytics for FSI clients.

Ms. Sridevi commenced the lecture by explaining the importance of historical data via a real life example. Our present-day decisions become biased based on the already existing data with us. All in all, analytics is about analyzing the historical data, finding patterns in it and making use of those insights for future references. Analytics has had a roller coaster journey throughout its inception. It is about mining the data and then theorizing upon the insights, i.e. letting the data speak for itself!

Analytics has evolved from the descriptive model (reacting post occurrence of an incident) to analyzing previous data to a diagnostic model (questioning the occurrences to make arrangements for future consequences) - this is how the predictive model evolved- which is used by majority of the industries. Ms. Sridevi’s initial focus was on predictive analysis only. She also talked about how real time analysis in possible today due to the discovery and present-day-boom of big data. For example, pattern discovery and web analysis is done to evaluate the time spent on the internet by users around the globe.

Ms. Sridevi’s next part of the lecture threw light on what Infosys has in its bag to offer in the field of analytics. She talked about customer insights (web-based segmentation), customer profitability (providing differentiated services to the customers), attrition analysis (customers that leave you), transnational behavior analysis, loyalty analysis, campaign analysis, marketing promotion and social & web analysis. She also explained as to why attrition is a crucial factor, reason being that making a new customer is costlier than regaining or retaining an old one. On the importance of campaign analysis, she explained about the expenditure on campaigns for different loyalty levels of customers.

Ms. Sridevi discussed about uplift modeling, also known as incremental modeling, which is a predictive modelling technique that directly models the incremental impact of a treatment (such as a direct marketing action) on an individual's behavior.

She covered topics like operational analytics, risk and compliance analytics, customer life cycle, web analytics, predicting web path (market basket analysis algorithm). She also introduced us to the newer methods used nowadays- uplift modelling, machine learning, Markov’s chain (which tells us that our current position decides our next position), continuous learning, factorial design and survival analysis.

Lastly she talked about the latest telematics techniques namely social media, real time analysis, image analytics (for frauds), drone data analytics, electronic gadgets data.

Ms. Sridevi kept the lecture an enthusiastic two-way interaction introduced us to a whole new world of analytics with several dimensions which couldn’t have been possible otherwise.