Coalescing Data and Decision Sciences for Analytics

The dream of analytics is to work from common, clean, and consistent data sources in a manner that all of its facets (descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive) are sup- ported via a coherent vision of data and decision sciences. To the extent that data and decisions sciences work within logically/mathematically consistent frameworks, and that these paradigms operate within computationally realistic structures, ana- lytics will help organizations thrive. Done right, analytics promises to plant more OR/MS resources at C-suites where major corporate decisions are made. Done poorly, the OR/MS community will look back at these days as a lost opportunity to make a long-term difference to both theory and practice of analytics. With this tutorial, we invite the OR/MS community to join an intellectually vibrant endeavor to inte- grate seemingly disparate pillars, namely predictive and prescriptive analytics. Just as importantly, we show how OR/MS strengths in modeling, algorithms, and appli- cations can facilitate coalescing the data and decision sciences. We draw upon several examples which pair data science tools such as filtering and regression, to decision sci- ence tools such as Monte Carlo tree search and stochastic programming. The marriage of these two paradigms (data and decision sciences) is what we refer to as Learn- ing Enabled Optimization (LEO). This tutorial covers fundamental concepts for the fusion of statistical and optimization modeling, statistically approximate optimality, sampling-based algorithms, and finally, model assessment and selection.

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