Quarter 10 - Week 6

It's been a reasonably calm week, not much out of the ordinary. The profs continue to remind us about the upcoming projects so that we don't go crazy in the last one week. They're still very optimistic. Their faith in us is troubling... or rather guilt-inducing. Whatever works, right?

Business Data Mining & Decision Models

We continue with labs this week, we've been doing stuff on K-clusters and Decision trees. The funda of the first is simple, take reams of data and let the software (Clementine in this case) work its magic on it to bundle them into clusters. The more clusters you decide to have, the more 'internally aligned' the clusters are supposed to get. So, after a little hulabaloo, you get 4-5 clusters with descriptions like (Male, under 30's, <50000$ income), (Females, over 40s, >30000$ income)... etc etc. The second session had us doing decision trees, where we feed in a bunch of inputs to the software, drag in a model and 'train' it with one part of a data set. We then just apply the trained model to the rest of the dataset and check if it still accurately identifies the type of output we're expecting (based on its understanding of the training data set). Totally takes the fun out of number crunching, but saves us a heck of a lot of time. Yay. And here I thought, the point of number crunching was to identify some human aspects of what were evidently just becoming statistics.

Strategic Thinking and Decision Making

A very creative midterm, if you ask me. The prof tries to compare a Prisoner's Dilemma with a marriage, and asks us what strategies go where. Or he asks us why Apple comes out with an iTunes store, what's the point of it? Was it strategic, or a hint from God? Some questions like that, which required us to think, assume and chew on. Finally when we start discussing the solution, heated debates about what assumptions are right, what weren't. Why one answer is as good as another... sigh, that's probably why some IIMB profs stopped getting creative with their questions. It's difficult to 'hold on' to assumptions...

We were supposed to do a case in the next session, but apparently EVERYONE forgot there was a case, and didnt even realize that the handout wasn't in the book. The perplexed prof has come totally prepared for a heated case discussion, and then realizes to his consternation that the guys in class didn't even realize there was a case (though in our defense, we had a friggin' midterm!). So already tired from the debate, and the futility of it all, the class gets cancelled and for the first time... in our time at IIMB... we were left with a free period. I should be happy! Wonder why it doesn't feel good then.