Title:  Costs and Benefits of Summary Measures

Time:  friday,  7:30 pM - 8:30 PM

Abstract: Evaluating the impact of an athlete’s performance on a team, deciding on a treatment plan for a cancer patient, and evaluating how to encourage people to manage their weight are all interesting and carefully studied problems. In these examples and many others, decision-makers often ultimately rely on scoring systems that reduce high-dimensional data to a single value. We present the ways that scoring systems are similar across many applications, how they provide insights, how they can lead to difficulties, and how they can be evaluated and improved.

Bio: Rick teaches at Babson College, where he is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and Weissman Family Professor of Business Analytics. He has previously taught at Bentley University, Harvard University, Cornell University, and St. Michael’s College. He works as an applied statistician across various fields, with publications on sports, fraud detection in accounting, measuring creativity among business students, and biomechanics. Rick is the Vice President of the Mathematical Association of America and serves as the first editor of a new journal, Scatterplot, which debuted in 2024, intending to help mathematics teachers prepare students for careers in data science. He has experience as a runner (including 32 Boston marathons), a high school and college cross-country coach, a race director, and a youth sports coach in soccer, basketball, and baseball.