SafeGraph: Selling Data as a Service

In January 2021, the CEO of SafeGraph, a four-year-old startup selling data as a service, looked to the future. His goal was to become the most reliable source of data on a physical location. The company provided points of interest (POI) and pedestrian traffic data for nearly 7 million businesses in the US and Canada …

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23andMe: A Virtuous Loop

This case describes the founding story of 23andMe CEO and Co-Founder Anne Wojcicki and her recent attempts to scale the company’s genetic testing franchise directly to the consumer while expanding her pharmaceutical development efforts.

Data Science at Target

Paritosh Desai joined Target.com in 2013 as vice president of business intelligence, analytics and testing, investigating how the retailer can leverage its relatively small but thriving e-commerce arm to increase sales and attract customers. The case explores the technological and organizational challenges Desai faced and the tradeoffs he considered during his four-year journey to turn …

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K2: Brotherhood of the Rope (C)

Chris Warner led a team of experienced mountaineers on an expedition to the top of K2, the second highest in the world. After Warner and his team failed in their first attempts, they rallied other teams in hopes of reaching the top and representing eight different countries to work together for success. His story is …

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Assessing Prediction Accuracy of Machine Learning Models

The note presents a variety of methods for evaluating the accuracy of predictive machine learning models. The note begins with a brief introduction to machine learning, overfitting, training against test data sets, and cross-validation. The following precision metrics and tools are described below: root mean square error (MSE), mean absolute deviation (MAD), Brier score and …

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Canadian Tire: Business Intelligence in 2008

In March 2008, the Vice President of Governance, Architecture and Corporate and Diversified Business of Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) was confident that the Business Intelligence (BI) system planned for 2005 is now operational. The right people and processes were already in place. With the right people at different levels of the organization and various process-related …

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