Abstract: 

The truths and lies of survey data, or how to model public opinions in the media age.

“ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.” Elon Musk ESG tweet.May 21, 2022
Do you think Elon Musk is right? What do other people think of ESG?

In the big data era, surprisingly, surveys still play a crucial role in market research. We know that people often have self-servicing biases in surveys. So how do you overcome these self-servicing biases in market research data?

I will talk about practical methods to model survey data effectively to avoid cheaters and self-attestation tendencies to lie, using statistics, analytics, and ML/AI.

In my talk, I will explain how to treat surveys as big data and combine them with additional data sources for effective modeling. Using benchmarking techniques and novel modeling approaches, we may find the underlying gems in this somewhat old-fashioned yet still relevant information source.

We will delve into how to understand what people think, feel, and what drives consumer activities by using a combination of surveys, mainstream and social media, reviews, and other data sources, by applying statistical methods combined with NLP and deep learning. I will demonstrate these techniques with a few thought-provoking examples from the vastly emerging data on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) perceptions.

Bio: 

Anna Litvak-Hinenzon is SVP, Global Head of Data Science at The RepTrak Company. She leads RepTrak’s global international data organization, providing clients with actionable data insights on Reputation, Brand, and ESG. As a data and technology leader for over 15 years, Anna helps organizations to achieve goals with data products powered by cutting-edge machine learning and AI models leveraging multiple data sources. Anna is a passionate digital transformation leader, an author of numerous patents and papers, with a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in her background.