Applying statistical tools to help understand business processes and make informed business decisions has attracted enormous amount of research interests in recent years. In this dissertation, we develop and apply data mining techniques to two sources of data, online bidding data for eBay and...

The U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) is inherently highly stochastic. Yet,many existing decision support tools for air traffic flow management take a deterministic approach to problem solving. In this study, we focus on the flight departure delays because such delays serve as inputs to many...

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a very popular optimization tool for mixture problems and in particular for model-based clustering problems. However, while the algorithm is convenient to implement and numerically very stable, it only produces local solutions. Thus, it may not...

This paper presents a novel intelligent bidding system, called SOABER (Simultaneous Online Auction BiddER), which monitors simultaneous online auctions of high-value fine art items. It supports decision-making by maximizing bidders' surpluses and their chances of winning an auction. One key...

The path that the price takes during an on-line auction plays an important role in understanding and forecasting on-line auctions. Price dynamics, such as the price velocity or its acceleration, capture the speed at which auction information changes. The ability to estimate price dynamics...

Forecasting prices in online auctions is important for both buyers and sellers. With good forecasts, bidders can make informed bidding decisions and sellers can select the right time and place to list their products. While information from other auctions can help forecast an ongoing auction, it...