Transcript - Statistics & Big Data Projects

Our project essentially focuses on trying to help Walmart.com predict the lead times that they get whenever they receive shipments from vendors to their distribution centers. And we created a tool that will help them make these predictions. Because if they know when things are coming in, and if they know that ahead of time, that is very valuable to them.

Whenever you're facing a decision in a company, one of the things you've got to be careful about is risk. What are you screwing up? What are you missing? What kind of uncertainties do you have to deal with day to day?

We want to sort of capture those day to day uncertainties, so we do that through a range of statistics to sort of analyze their databases. There's also a probability modeling, which is kind of the other side of statistics. They're kind of the same thing. And then we roll all that stuff together, and we can say, our base models tell us that if you take this following approach, here is what you can roughly expect in terms of changes.

We use SQL to get data from various database files. A lot of statistical analysis techniques-- in particular, we used the R programming language. To develop the tool, we used Excel VBA.

For me, the takeaway was not just the technical skills, but more of the appreciation of what people are doing in the workplace. And it helps me be excited as to what I'm going to be doing when I actually start working.