All the times you jumped on Yelp to complain? Those reviews are coming in handy for Yi Yang, an M.S. in Data Science & Analytics student at the Robinson College of Business. In her Data Management for Analytics class with Dr. Houping Xiao, Yang scraped text from the four major healthcare review sites—Google, Healthgrades, Yelp, and Zocdoc. The point of the project was to compare customers’ experience at one WellStar site with other metro Atlanta WellStar locations. The process was much more complicated than looking at average total Yelp stars.
“Star ratings don’t give a comprehensive picture,” Yang said. “A lenient person might complain a lot in the text but still give five stars.”
By examining the data and performing a sentiment analysis, Yang pinpointed trends in patient bellyaching, and suggested improvements to increase customer satisfaction.
“It ended up having nothing to do with the quality of the hospital,” Yang said. “One of the biggest frustrations was parking lot logistics.”
Yang also participated in the program’s trademark experience: an Insight Sprint. Over the course of the semester, Yang collaborated with Georgia-Pacific on dynamic pricing for B2B customers. She analyzed six years of sales, demand and inventory data, using machine learning to maximize profits. Even in a situation of low inventory and increased demand, customers might resist purchasing if the price were too high. That’s where modeling comes into play.
“In class, our professors teach us a lot of code, tools, and fancy algorithms,” Yang said. “The sprint project helped me see the gap between what I learned and what the industry really needs.”