New Centre for Quantitative Analysis and Decision Support opens at Carleton

Decisions are rarely made under ideal circumstances because decision-makers are often faced with either too much or too little information. While tradition and instinct may provide guidance in certain cases, the nature and complexity of other situations require deeper scrutiny.

The Centre for Quantitative Analysis and Decision Support (CQADS) is a joint initiative of Carleton University’s Faculty of Science and the School of Mathematics and Statistics that offers a variety of analytical services to its clients.

“We can help formulate and answer the questions that shape the research, planning and business activities for all clients, from academia to the private sector and through all levels of public service,” said Patrick Boily, manager and senior consultant with CQADS.

For example, clients may work with the centre to:

• Generate rules used to flag suspicious behaviour in a large database of transactions (email, money transfers, phone calls, etc.).
• Assess needs and justify the allocation of resources to improve efficiency subject to the constraints of budget, time or environmental impact.
• Assess the direction they are headed based on historical data.
• Plan surveys or experiments in order to extract as much meaningful information as possible from results. For instance, if a client wanted to say something about the daily driving habits of Canadians, it pays to design a survey with a high probability of representing the Canadian driving population.
• Design a scheduling application to enable employees to exchange shifts without damaging specific properties of the master schedule. For example, a client may have a rule stating that on any shift there must be at least one employee with three or more years experience on the floor. The centre would help create an application that would block an exchange if it breaks this rule.

CQADS is built on the idea that the best decisions are backed by evidence. It will harness the strength and flexibility of quantitative methods, mathematics and statistical analysis.

View video of Patrick Boily talking about the Centre here.

Read the Ottawa Citizen article on the new Centre here.