DaSSWeb | Big Data Forecasting with a Wanted Outcome; Advocacy versus Accuracy

Speaker
Auke Hunneman
BI Norwegian Business School

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Abstract

The Big Data (BD) era has been built on the promise of providing managers with a more accurate and objective basis for decision making by harnessing advances in computational power and the consequent ability to utilize huge amounts of data to more objectively, transparently, and accurately forecast a wide variety of outcomes including the best people to hire, the most effective medical treatment to provide, the lowest credit risk customers, and the likely global temperature on some future date. Yet the promised accuracy benefits of BD can typically only be met when model variables are generally well known and understood, and when the future is expected to be similar to the past contained in the analyzed databases. Yet such accuracy influences are seldom a concern when BD-based forecasting is used to support status quo change advocacy, and the current discussion introduces a new Wanted-Unwanted framework to reflect this advocacy versus accuracy clash of values. Two Environment/Social/Governance (ESG) related cases demonstrate how the new framework’s evaluative criteria determine the degree to which advocated change to the status quo is supported by ‘wanted’ data, processes, and forecasts rather than the ‘accuracy’ based counterparts that are the traditional focus of BD scholarship and practice. It is hoped that this examination of advocacy biased BD forecasting will inspire further discussion and research on the topic.

Short Bio
Auke Hunneman is Associate Professor at the Marketing Department of BI Norwegian Business School. He also is one of the developers and Associate Dean for BI’s Master of Science in Business Analytics. Auke earned his PhD in 2011 from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and he obtained his master’s degree in economics in 2004 at the same university. Auke’s dissertation develops quantitative models to support store location and design decisions. His research has appeared in high-quality marketing journals like the Journal of Retailing and the Journal of Business Research. He is an ad-hoc reviewer for, among others, the International Journal of Research in Marketing. Auke’s research interests include retailing, social networks, (spatial) econometric models, marketing mix modeling, and, more generally, marketing effectiveness. Auke has taught several courses, including Marketing Models (PhD), Marketing Analytics (MSc), and Marketing Management (Bachelor).