LA West R Users: June Meeting

LA West R Users Group will have our June meeting at Retina in Santa Monica. We'll have two talks followed by 30min of mingling time.

Talk1 (20min talk, 10min Q&A)
Title: Using GLRM on h2o to Predict Customer Lifetime Value

At Retina we estimate and predict customer lifetime value (CLV), a statistic that is growing in popularity among the marketing community. Typically, the existing statistical models seek to estimate value from purchase buying patterns. In this talk, we use an open-source R tool (available on H2O.ai) to build a generalized low rank model (a GLRM). This model allows us to leverage third party and auxiliary data to improve these estimates even further through clustering. We share our work so far applying this method to an eCommerce company by leveraging browsing behavior and survey answers to improve CLV predictions.

Bio:
Corinne Powers
Data Scientist, Retina

Corinne Powers is a Senior Data Scientist at Retina AI, where she seeks to understand, predict and optimize customer value. She earned a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Stanford University, where she used convex optimization and machine learning to craft a framework for handling messy data. Her work is made accessible to the R community through H2O.ai’s R package for Generalized Low Rank Models (GLRMs).

Talk2
Title: Are there any Globe Trotter Body Swappers to Figure out Who's who in NBA Lineups?

Description:
In the 'The Prisoner of Benda' episode of Futurama, the Planet Express crew swapped bodies and went on cooky hijinks. After the fun was over, the crew wanted to return to their original bodies. Armed with group theory, the genius Globe Trotters purposely swapped bodies with the Planet Express crew to restore everyone to normal.

In an earlier version of the NBA API, the 10 players on the court is represented in data with team, first initial, and last name. There are a few instances when two teammates with the same initial and last name are on the court at the same time. Can we use R to uniquely identify these different teammates so that we can accurately credit a stat to the right player?

Bio:
Michael Tzen is the Assistant Director for Statistics at UCLA's California Center for Population Research. Mike consults, collaborates, and leads workshops to solve data problems in population science. Mike's work has been presented at the Census Bureau's Center for Statistical Research & Methodology Seminar, the American Association for Public Opinion Research Conference, the Joint Statistical Meetings, and the Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports.

Timeline
– 6:30pm open door (Retina is sponsoring us DONUTS!)
– 6:55pm intro from LA West R User Group & Retina
– 7:00pm Talk1
– 7:30pm Talk2
– 8:00pm mingle time
– 8:30pm event ends
Code of Conduct: https://github.com/laRusers/codeofconduct

Venue
Address: Retina, 631 Wilshire Blvd. Ste 301, Santa Monica, CA 90401
Direction: There is parking available in the lot behind 631 Wilshire Blvd. If that lot is full, there should be plenty of street parking available. Once in the parking lot, follow signs to the building’s shared staircase, climb to the third floor, and follow signs on your left to the building’s patio.

About Retina
Retina is a venture-backed startup located in Santa Monica, CA, that brings the power of artificial intelligence to the single most valuable metric for marketers: customer lifetime value. Using insights from Retina, companies like Dollar Shave Club, Madison Reed, and other ecommerce disruptors have already recognized opportunities to optimize their marketing mix based on our highly accurate long-term customer value and cost per acquisition modeling.

LA (West) R Users Group
Email: larusers@gmail.com
Invite yourself to our Slack group: http://bit.ly/laerug
Follow us on Twitter: @la_Rusers
Check out more events: laocr.org/

We are working on building a network for all useRs in SoCal. Come be our guest! Come be our speaker!