Pei Xu is an assistant professor in the area of business analytics. She received her
doctorate in decision science and information systems from the University of Kentucky
in 2014. Her research focus is on understanding the economic and social impact of
emerging information technology, in areas including online user-generated content,
crowdsourcing, social media for e-commerce and healthcare, and FinTech. In her research,
a variety of quantitative approaches (e.g., econometrics, statistics, machine learning)
are leveraged to discover insights from corporate datasets. Her research has been
published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals, including several Financial Times' Top 50 Business Journals.
She teaches two business analytics major courses, Business Analytics II and Predictive
Modeling II. The latter aims to go beyond the traditional regression approaches and
to provide an overview of those modern predictive methods (e.g., Neural Network and
Deep Learning, Random Forest, Boosting and Bagging) in the context of marketing, finance,
and other essential business decisions.