Yuting Yuan received her Ph.D. in Operations Management from Simon Business School, University of Rochester in 2022. Before joining Smeal, she was a visiting faculty at the College of William & Mary. Her research mainly focuses on (1) understanding and improving service operations and (2) enhancing interpretability in high-stakes decision-making.

Education

Ph.D., Operations Management, University of Rochester, 2022

M.S., Financial Statistics, Rutgers University, 2013

B.S., Mathematics, Nanjing University, 2010

Courses Taught

BAN 841 – Data Mining for Business (3)
Intended for recent graduates with little to no professional experience, BAN 541 develops business students' understanding of and ability to apply a variety of data mining tools and techniques for use in detecting and exploiting patterns and relationships in large structured and unstructured data sets derived from a variety of business scenarios. Students will explore the use of cluster analysis, classification, association, and cause-and-effect modeling techniques to explore and reduce data, classify new data elements, identify natural associations among variables, create rules for target marketing or buying recommendations, and describe relationships among data that motivate business performance. Specific techniques may include k-nearest neighbor, discriminant analysis, and association rule mining. Students will learn how to bridge descriptive and predictive analytics across a variety of business scenarios. Coursework includes individual assignments intended to develop confidence with basic data mining techniques, followed by case-based problems that challenge students' creativity and data mining mastery in search of patterns and data relationships leading to useful business insights. While underlying theory will be discussed, the course will prepare business analysts by focusing specifically on data mining applications in marketing, finance, supply chain management, and other business areas, with an emphasis on the unique aspects of decision making in a business environment. Software packages, concepts, and business applications will vary and evolve to keep pace with technology, theory, and instructor interest.

MIS 441 – Bus Intelligence (3)
Application of Information Technology based methods and tools to analyze business data and support decision making. MIS 441 Business Intelligence for Decision Making (3) Business intelligence encompasses the IT tools for exploring, analyzing, integrating, and reporting business data for fact-based, intelligent decision making. This course primarily investigates methods and tools for exploring and analyzing large amounts of business data also called "Big Data." Learning methods emphasize active learning in the application of methods and tools to real data and the presentation of the results. Students will be exposed to a variety of methods for analyzing both structured and unstructured data and they will work with business data sets to understand the value that can be extracted from large data sets. They will also learn how to classify and associate data to discover business rules that can be used to support decision making. The course will also cover methods to analyze social media information and about tools that can facilitate such analysis and discovery. Again they will get a chance to work with data from real social networks to gain an appreciation of how value can be obtained from such networks. Finally, they will learn about techniques for visualizing, presenting and communicating information in a useful way, e.g. through dashboards and with other technologies on various platforms.

Selected Publications

Yuan Y., "Managing Flexible Capacity in Service Systems with Worker Shortages." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2025
Bravo F., Rudin C., Shaposhnik Y., Yuan Y., "Interpretable Prediction Rules for Congestion Risk in Intensive Care Units." Stochastic Systems, vol. 14, no. 2, 2023, pp. 111-130

Research Impact and Media Mention

"Anticipating Overcrowding Risk in the ICU", UCLA Anderson Review, Journal or Magazine, anderson-review.ucla.edu/anticipating-overcrowding-risk-in-the-icu/

Honors and Awards