The winners of the CDRC’s 2016 Masters Research Dissertation Programme were recently announced at the Demographics User Group Conference.
The CDRC led programme provides the opportunity for students to work directly with an industrial partner and links students’ research to important retail and ‘open data’ sources. Once again the standard of the projects was extremely high this year, with students working with a range of partners, including Sainsbury’s, Shop Direct, Boots and E.ON.
The Winners
Prize winner: Luis Francisco Mejia and Movement Strategies
Luis’ research used temporal geodata collected from the mobile phones of attendees at a festival to model movements across a festival site. In particular, he looked at using complex machine learning techniques such as artificial neural networks to model and predict and when each participant is likely to visit catering facilities across the festival site. His models were then tested with a random selection of data which were not used in the original analysis and were found to be very successful.
The judges felt that this was a well-executed study with very clear aims and objectives. They also felt that the commercial relevance of the work is well communicated.
Runner up: Ffion Carney and E.On
Ffion’s study aimed to identify areas that contain a high proportion of vulnerable households that should be targeted as part of the ECO, by taking into account demographic and property characteristics alongside average annual energy consumption data.
The judges highlighted that this project tackles a very interesting research area and commented that Ffion had devised an appropriate methodology which could clearly address the research questions.
Runner up: Mariflor Vega and Sainsbury’s
The aim of Mariflor’s study was to develop a means to understand the different types of customers based purely on the content of their baskets. She used a range of text mining techniques to harvest the data and group the customers.
The judges felt that this was a comprehensive analysis which was completed, explained, interpreted and presented well.
Other projects completed this year included:
- Modelling Multi-Channel Adoption at Sainsbury’s – Sainsbury’s
- An investigation of what triggers customer activiation of credit facilities – Shop Direct
- An analysis of Argos concession store performance located in Homebase and Sainsbury’s stores across the UK – Argos
- How does competitor presence influence the performance of click and collect sites?- Sainsbury’s
- Identifying drivers of full price sales of clothing and footwear for an online retailer – Shop Direct
- The performance of Argos concessions in other stores – Argos
- Can interactive data visualizations enable a retailer to identify new insights about customer purchase behaviour? – Sainsbury’s
- Youths Spending & Geodemographics – goHenry
- Topic extraction and document classification on textual survey data with unsupervised modelling techniques. – CACI
- An empirical study in to Co-op On-the-Go Stores’ turn-in rate using a scorecard approach – The Co-operative Food
- An investigation into the potential of Bluetooth Beacons to monitor the movement of people on public transport: A preliminary case study of the Norwich Bus Network – Movement Strategies
- Customer Segmentation using spatio-temporal data – Boots
2017 Retail Masters Dissertation Programme
We are now seeking proposals from businesses for new projects due to commence next spring (2017). Further information.
We hope to advertise the 2017 opportunities towards the end of the year.
Should you have any queries relating to the programme, please contact Guy Lansley.