Dr. Albert Lee, Founding Partner of Summit Consulting, talks with Dr. Mark Hutson, Summit’s Manager of Data Science and Modeling & Statistics about his recent paper Predictive Analytics: the New Tool to Combat Fraud, Waste and Abuse.

At Summit, we provide our clients with data-driven insights, typically basing our results on readily available historical data. We use these data to build models for assessing policy decisions and understanding economic impacts based on what we know has happened and what we think will happen next. Then we combine our judgement with historical information to predict the magnitude of these results. Yet today, many of our clients are scrambling to understand the most likely impacts of COVID-19 on their respective portfolios of business, despite it being an event with few (or any) historical parallels. The question becomes, how do we use historical data and existing tools to determine anything better than a wild guess?

Summit’s Partner, Anthony Curcio, recently sat down with Alok Mathur, President of Global Project Finance Advisory Council, a global project finance advisory firm that has closed $125.4 billion in infrastructure-related finance transactions.  Mr. Mathur brings real insight into screening infrastructure projects, which is very timely given our nation's focus on rebuilding our infrastructure.

Summit’s newest Director, Josh Goldberg, sat down with Partner Anthony Curcio in December 2019 to chat about model risk management and internal controls.

In this episode of Complexity Simplified, Summit’s founding partner Albert Lee, PhD, talks to statistician Alan Salzberg, PhD, about the role of statistics in False Claims Act (FCA) litigation cases.

They discuss what the FCA is and how expert statisticians and economists can leverage data to provide evidence of fraudulent behavior (or lack thereof) or to calculate damages.

Last week, Olivia Hebner and Laura Hoesly attended the Government Analytics Breakfast Forum: Using Analytics to Combat the Opioid Crisis sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and REI Systems. The speakers included Allison Oelschlaeger (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), Dr. Mona Siddiqui (Health and Human Services), and Dr. Jim Kyung-Soo Liew (Johns Hopkins University). During the forum, speakers and audience members discussed data sources available to the federal government, challenges the government faces when analyzing the data, steps already taken, and possible methods for analyzing the data going forward.

Here at Summit, we guide Federal agencies, financial institutions, and litigators as they decode their most complex analytical challenges. But we know our clients aren't the only ones who want to hear what economics and statistics can teach us about our daily lives.

That's why we're launching a new podcast and video series: Complexity Simplified. Through interviews, panels, and question-and-answer series with our staff of economists, econometricians, and data scientists, we'll break down topics in statistics, economics, and data analytics.

Last week, I attended the Data Intelligence Conference hosted by Capital One in McLean, Virginia. The three-day conference focused on a community of practitioners in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence modeling. The talks at the conference centered on predictive modeling methods, real-life case studies involving machine learning and predictive analytics, data governance and security issues, and other data cleaning and visualization methods.

On September 2016, I attended the first annual White House Open Data Innovation Summit. This event brought together individuals from the government, nonprofit, and private sectors to talk about the future of open government data. 

More and more organizations are releasing their administrative data to the public, whether because of Federal regulations or calls for increased transparency. There's a lot to consider before releasing this kind of information, and many groups struggle when deciding how to share their data most efficiently. Thankfully, many groups are already packaging their data in new and creative ways. Read on for several examples.