Spears School of Business

 

Oklahoma State University students from the Spears School of Business master’s in business analytics program scored in the top 50 of more than 500 teams competing at the Humana-Mays Healthcare Analytics Case Competition sponsored by the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University.

 

For the second year in a row, OSU students finished in the top 10 percent of the highly competitive event that allows master’s degree students to showcase analytical skills by solving real-world business problems utilizing healthcare data. This year’s Spears Business students included the team of Soumya Patra and Nikhil Vishwanath and the team of Kalyan Kumar, Vinil Rayala and Maruthi Sankar Nanduri.

 

OSU competitor Soumya Patra said his team analyzed 800 factors that may or may not affect a patient's health care due to a transportation barrier.

 

“We had to brainstorm various methods to figure important factors that affect the transportation issues,” Patra said. “We used basic statistics methods to create a complex machine-learning algorithm to reduce the factors to 20 and came up with a final model, which could accurately predict 76 percent of the cases. We identified 3 clusters in the population who are affected by transportation issues and provided tailormade solutions for each cluster.

 

“Overall the experience was great and helped us to grow our knowledge on solving real-time problems using our analytical skills. I would like to thank Dr. Goutam Chakraborty for his teaching, which helped us tackle the problem in more structured way and come out with recommendations. Without the help of Dr C and Spears School of Business we may not have able to come up with a high-performing model.”

 

“The Humana-Mays competition is a prestigious event and attracts some of the best students from across the U.S. to leverage their skills in analytics to solve challenging issues,” said OSU competitor Nikhil Viswanath. “We were thrilled to learn that we made it to the top 50 and owe a huge part of our success to the MS BAnDS program.

 

“As part of the program, every year we get an opportunity to represent OSU at many regional and national analytics competitions, and this helps us develop the skills required to compete to the best of our abilities.”

 

“I am very proud of our analytics students who continue to perform well in national analytics competition and analytics conferences,” said Dr. Goutam Chakraborty, SAS Professor of Marketing Analytics and director of the MS in Business Analytics and Data Science program. “This is the second time in the last two years that our teams finished in the top 50 in the Humana-Mays competition.”

 

Visit the website to learn more about OSU’s MS BAnDS program.