25 April 2010 by Sanjay Saigal.

At the recently concluded INFORMS Practice Meeting I described the current state of Probability Management, with emphasis on real world usage. Probability Management is a relatively new tool for robust uncertainty-aware decision-making based on using Monte-Carlo Simulation in an interactive and highly visual manner. It is enabled by new technical developments that I previously documented in Analytics Magazine.

The Practice meeting organizers used to request slides six weeks in advance. This was done to print the “proceedings” (slides, not actual papers) binder in time. Since the conference began providing slides on CD a couple of years ago, the advance has halved. Even so, I ended up doing a significantly different presentation than I’d planned a month out. For those who attended the presentation in Orlando, the updated slides can be downloaded here.

Unlike folks who memorialize each stray pearl of wisdom in Powerpoint, I only put up enough verbiage to remind me what I should say. So my slides are not terribly useful on their own. If you are interested in the Probability Management, you might do better to start with its two-part description in OR/MS Today [Part I and Part II], continue with my Analytics article, and then only look at the slides from Orlando.

Posted in INFORMS, Probability Management, Operations Research | 1 Comment »

12 December 2008 by Sanjay Saigal.

In recent weeks I have been working with Sam Savage, well-known OR personality and a consulting professor at Stanford. We’re focusing on developing a practice framework for Probability Management. Whazzat, you ask? In sum, Probability Management is all about robust decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. (Pretty much the vision for Intechné!)

Since real world decision problems are almost always ill-structured and fuzzy, our tools of choice belong to the worlds of simulation, and statistical visualization. Stochastic optimization plays a role too, but in a very different form than typically understood, say, in Operations Research circles. In general, we are not interested in creating IT systems that generate “best possible” recommendations. Rather, we enable managers to interactively explore the decision space of good solutions, using something similar to a business intelligence (BI) approach. The key difference between BI and Probability Management is that while BI is essentially descriptive (identifying multi-factorial relationships, typically for historical data) Probability Management is prescriptive: our clients learn what to do better.

I intend to write further on this topic, but for now let me point interested readers to our newly redesigned web site. The organization is a loose consortium of academic and commercial folks involved in the field, as vendors, users, and advisors. Check out the Interact! tab. It contains illustrative Excel models that describe the relevant concepts far better than long-winded descriptions. If you find it interesting and wish to discuss further, contact me.

Posted in Probability Management, Business Intelligence, Intechné, Risk | 1 Comment »