Statistics Colloquium

THE DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES AND
THE CENTER FOR APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS,
NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

2:30 PM
Wednesday, October 30, 2002

Cullimore Hall Room 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology





Stuart Altschuler

USPC Marketing Group / Research and Analytical Marketing

Raj Nigam

Management Science Group

Merrill Lynch, Princeton, New Jersey

" Merging multiple, messy, missing, and multicollinear variables into one meaningful measure "

We outline our statistical modeling strategy to combine responses to multiple questions on a client satisfaction survey into a single measure. We begin by describing the business problem that drove this analysis. Then we describe our strategies for imputing the missing data in the survey questions, reducing the variable set, specifying and transforming the dependent variable, and assessing impact of multicollinearity as we develop a statistical model. We explain the interplay of multivariate statistical techniques - principal component analysis, classification trees, and logistic regression - to gain different perspectives of the data. And how we finally succeeded in developing a single measure of client satisfaction.