Title: Data Mining for Business Analytics: Concepts, Techniques, and Applications

Report Abstract: 

Data mining is a process of discovering and extracting useful information from considerably large data sets, databases, or the collection of linked data sets. Theoretically, it has been integrated with many other techniques from different domains such as statistics, mathematics, and machine learning methods; it can be used to identify trends, pattern recognition, database and data warehouse system handling, information retrieval, and visualization for decision-making and planning in the fields of banking and finance, insurance, telecommunication, social media and etc. Generally, the data mining process is carried out under 5 major steps. They are data understanding, data preparation, modeling, evaluation, and model development.

At the present, Sri Lanka’s economic outlook has been running highly uncertain due to fiscal and external imbalances. Due to the bad impact of the recent currency depreciation on banks’ balance sheets, the finance, and telecommunication industries in Sri Lanka are in big trouble. With the low-interest rate and high banking long-rate scenarios, the number of customers leaving the industries has been increasing reducing the core banking profitability in mature markets.

The main purpose of this speech is to propose data mining techniques and their applications for making novel customer churn prediction models, customer relationship management (CRM), and customer retention in the field of the telecommunication industry and banking sector, in Sri Lanka; especially, data mining and machine learning techniques have been widely used in our study for customer retention in the unbalanced business environment as well as prediction of future financial events such as credit ratings, investment analysis, trading futures, and understanding and managing financial risk.

Speaker: Prof. Kapila Rathnayaka

Date/Time: 09:00 – 10:00PM, 14 February, 2023

Location: CEM building 706

Speaker Biography: 

Prof Kapila Rathnayaka is presently working as a Professor in Statistics, at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka. He obtained his B.Sc. (Special) Degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka with the First class Honours (2008) and obtained his first Master’s Degree in Industrial Mathematics from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura (2009-2011). In 2011, he was awarded his second Master’s Degree in Statistics, at Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China (2011-2013). During his Master’s Degree, he received a number of prestigious international awards including the Chinese Scholarship Council Award (CSC) for Outstanding student of the year (2013/2014) and Outstanding Graduate Student of the year (Master Degree) in 2013. In 2016, he obtained his Doctoral Degree with a number of prestigious international awards for his best performances including the Scientific Achievements Award for Publications (2016), the Presidential Award for Outstanding Contributions (2014/2015), and Outstanding Graduate Student of the year for Doctoral Degree program in 2013/2016. Furthermore, he was awarded Outstanding Junior Researcher 2020 in the 25th-anniversary ceremony, at Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka. Moreover, he was awarded the best researcher 2021 award by the Faculty of Applied Sciences, 26th University Day Celebrations, Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka.

Currently, he is involved in multi-disciplinary applied research, with a specific focus on economic, financial, and biostatistics. Additionally, he is very well conversant in data analysis under different practical scenarios based on traditional and novel introduced statistical approaches. He has published his work in several reputed international journals such as Modern Economy, Grey Systems: Theory and Application and etc.