Functional data analysis can be challenging when the functional objects are sampled only very sparsely and unevenly. Most approaches rely on smoothing to recover the underlying functional object from the data which can be difficult if the data is irregularly distributed. In this paper we present...

The wide and growing popularity of online auctions creates enormous amounts of publicly available bid data providing an important topic for research. These data pose unique statistical challenges because of their special structures. This research focuses on methods for representing, visualizing,...

In recent years, the increasing popularity of eCommerce, and particularly online auctions has stirred a great amount of scholarly research, especially in information systems, economics,and marketing, but little or no attention has been received from statistics. ECommerce arrives with enormous...

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...

Even though auctions are capturing an increasing share of commerce, they are typically treated in the theoretical economics literature as isolated. That is, an auction is typically treated as a single seller facing multiple buyers or as a single buyer facing multiple sellers. In this paper, we...

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...

Creating a loyal customer base is one of the most important, and at the same time, most difficult tasks a company faces. Creating loyalty online (e-loyalty) is especially difficult since customers can "switch" to a competitor with the click of a mouse. In this paper we investigate e-loyalty in...

Pre-release demand forecasting is crucial for allocating limited marketing resources and is one of the most challenging tasks facing decision makers. In this study, we present a powerful pre-release forecasting method via functional shape analysis (FSA) of the trading price histories of an...

The flexibility of time and location as well as the availability of an abundance of both old and new products makes online auctions an important part of people's daily shopping experience. While many bidders rely on variants of the well-documented early or last-minutes bidding strategies,...