(103b) Business Insight from Big Data in the Chemical Industry

Dow’s Advanced Analytics team provides actionable insights to key business and corporate leaders using a wide range of computational methods. We are continuously striving to integrate any sources of information that can make our models more timely and accurate to improve decision making. Currently the most abundant sources of available data are found in unstructured forms located across both internal servers and external sites. These unstructured data sources come in a variety of forms (emails, word documents, trade journals, traditional news, and social media) which pose unique acquisition, pre-processing, analysis, and storage challenges. In this discussion, we will share our challenges and successes when working with these large unstructured data sources to improve model quality, identify marketing opportunities, and quantitatively assess consumer sentiment.  We will conclude with our findings and recommendations for incorporating Big Data into analytics for the chemical manufacturing industry.