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The Value of Knowing What You Don't Know
Few of us really like uncertainty. It fills us with dread. It frustrates our planning efforts. It makes analyzing its effects complex. After all, where in a spreadsheet do you put uncertain values for revenue or costs? Admittedly, accounting for...
More »Announcing Analytica 4.5
Lumina Decision Systems has announced the release of Analytica 4.5. One change that is sure to garner lots of attention is the new Analytica Free 101 edition. That's right -- there is now a fully functional edition of Analytica that you can...
More »Fast Times to the Core
I remember a time when my driver’s license was just a learner’s permit, tater tots were the best part of lunch, my Great Gatsby book report was due on Friday, and physics was all about stick figures and...
More »Salesforce Performance Attributes and Prediction
Running the sales arm of a company has its mix of regular client communications and stressful growth seeking periods. Good management of the salesforce and expectations from executives to salespeople demands understanding attributes of salesforce performance. Imagine needing to ramp...
More »Smart Grid Electricity Management and Decision Analytics
To smart or not to smart, that is the question! Except, despite what our TV offerings often display, going smart is always the best choice. Like any human-made system, we should aim toward smart designs, and we need this for...
More »Climate Change Effects and Econometric Electricity Demand Forecasting
Whether you find global warming as an ethereal notion only worthy of banter or, like many scientists, a real phenomenon to be studied, the effects pose difficulty for practitioners to forecast the behavior of commodities like electricity and...
More »Electricity Price Forecasting via Time-Series, Regression, and Nearest Neighbor Models
Flip the switch and the light goes on. How simple it is to take this for granted. Large-scale engineered and networked systems manage our daily electrical needs, and many negotiations and transactions happen so that we can fire up our...
More »Predictive Analytics and Theories for Crude Oil Price Fluctuations Using Time-Series Models
What’s in a barrel of crude oil? For starters, its price affects global economies. The Asian Financial Crisis that started in 1997 had international investors put a lid on funding, which sparked reductions in oil exports. With boiling demand for...
More »Predictive Analytics for Commercial Air Travel Demand from Passenger Decision to Individual Market M
The recent global recession that spread since 2008 hit us hard, and commercial air travel received no dispensation. Although jet fuel prices dropped in 2009, the dwindling air travel demand produced a “worst-ever” performance for world air carriers, as noted in...
More »Risk Analysis Methods from Probability, Clustering, to Multi-attribute Utility Theory
Machine failure, patient injury, terrorist attacks, and oil spills are just a few events we endure and have to prepare for in life, and they are things that we have to manage. It is hard to manage things that are...
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