#23 Bayesian Stats in Business and Marketing Analytics, with Elea McDonnel Feit

If you’ve studied at a business school, you probably didn’t attend any Bayesian stats course there. Well this isn’t like that in every business schools! Elea McDonnel Feit does integrate Bayesian methods into her teaching at the business school of Drexel University, in Philadelphia, US. 

Elea is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Drexel, and in this episode she’ll tell us which methods are the most useful in marketing analytics, and why.

Indeed, Elea develops data analysis methods to inform marketing decisions, such as designing new products and planning advertising campaigns. Often faced with missing, unmatched or aggregated data, she uses MCMC sampling, hierarchical models and decision theory to decipher all this.

After an MS in Industrial Engineering at Lehigh University and a PhD in Marketing at the University of Michigan, Elea worked on product design at General Motors and was most recently the Executive Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative.

Thanks to all these experiences, Elea loves teaching marketing analytics and Bayesian and causal inference at all levels. She even wrote the book R for Marketing Research and Analytics with Chris Chapman, at Springer Press.

In summary, I think you’ll be pretty surprised by how Bayesian the world of marketing is…

Our theme music is « Good Bayesian », by Baba Brinkman (feat MC Lars and Mega Ran). Check out his awesome work at https://bababrinkman.com/ !

Links from the show:

• Elea's website: http://eleafeit.com/
• R for Marketing Research and Analytics: http://r-marketing.r-forge.r-project.org/
• Elea's Tutorials & Online Courses: http://eleafeit.com/teaching/
• Elea on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eleafeit
• Elea on GitHub: https://github.com/eleafeit
• Tutorial on Conjoint Analysis in R: https://github.com/ksvanhorn/ART-Forum-2017-Stan-Tutorial
• Test & Roll app: https://testandroll.shinyapps.io/testandroll/
• Test & Roll Paper -- Profit-Maximizing A/B Tests: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3274875
• Principal Stratification for Advertising Experiments: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3140631
• CausalImpact R package: https://google.github.io/CausalImpact/CausalImpact.html
• Chapter on Data Fusion in marketing: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-05542-8_9-1
• Statistical Analysis with Missing Data (Little & Rubin): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119013563
• R-Ladies Philly YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPque9BaFV9p0hcgImrYBzg

Thank you to my Patrons for making this episode possible!

Yusuke Saito, Avi Bryant, Ero Carrera, Brian Huey, Giuliano Cruz, Tim Gasser, James Wade, Tradd Salvo, Adam Bartonicek, William Benton, Alan O'Donnell, Mark Ormsby, Demetri Pananos, James Ahloy, Jon Berezowski, Robin Taylor, Thomas Wiecki, Chad Scherrer, Vincent Arel-Bundock, Nathaniel Neitzke, Zwelithini Tunyiswa, Elea McDonnell Feit, Bertrand Wilden, James Thompson, Stephen Oates, Gian Luca Di Tanna, Jack Wells, Matthew Maldonado, Ian Costley, Ally Salim, Larry Gill, Joshua Duncan, Ian Moran and Paul Oreto.