Fair Isaac Corporation

09/16/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/16/2024 04:18

FICO Scientist Honored at Leading Operational Research Conference

A team of four researchers including FICO's Claudio Gambella has been awarded the EURO Award 2024 for the Best EJOR Survey Paper. The team won for its article in the European Journal of Operational Research that provides an overview of how mathematical optimization models can be used to express and solve regression, classification, and machine learning tasks. The Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) grants these annual awards for significant, relevant and original scientific contributions in Operations Research and to the practice of decision making.

Claudio Gambella, Bissan Ghaddar, and Joe Naoum-Sawaya (in the center of the picture, flanked by two EURO jury members) won the EURO Award for an article that appeared in the May 2021 edition of EJOR. They explored the possibilities offered by viewing regression, classification, clustering, deep and adversarial learning as mathematical optimization models.

Operational research, also known as operations research and OR, is the application of science to solving complex business problems. It includes technologies such as AI, predictive analytics, optimization and rules systems that enable other organizations to make better decisions.

Exploring Optimization and Regression

"Mathematical optimization approaches can give the data analyst the possibility of quantifying and limiting statistical quantities such as noise in data," said Claudio Gambella, who leverages FICO's optimization tools to help FICO's partners and their customers solve large-scale assignment problems in finance. "In addition, for fitting training functions, custom constraints and objectives can be introduced only when needed by the specific application, so as to limit the computational complexities. The versatility and flexibility of optimization formulations allows for designing custom solution approaches. This is an important line of research and development, particularly benefiting from the maturity of commercial optimization software to solve the problems to optimality or to devise effective heuristics."

A possibility offered by mathematical optimization for regression models is to build models that are driven by the data scientist'sexperience, domain knowledge and the characteristics of the dataset, as an alternative to heuristic rules or cross-validation approaches.

Claudio and his teammates have shown the incredible power of mathematical optimization and the opportunities for using optimization methods in regression, classification, and machine learning tasks. For example, such approaches have been indirectly applied to FICO Decision Optimizer's action-effect modeling app, which enables business analysts to develop real-world models, and evaluate the variables' predictive power and decision sensitivities, in a visual, interactive development environment.

"Dr. Claudio Gambella's achievement is a tremendous example of FICO scientists' continual focus on innovation in the fields of analytics, statistics, machine learning and optimization," said Dr. Scott Zoldi, FICO's chief analytics officer. "It is always wonderful to see innovation recognized, and specifically Dr. Gambella's recognized by the EURO Award 2024 Best EJOR Survey paper honor."

Congratulations to the team on their work and their award!

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