Statistical Consultation for Corporations, Non-Profits, and Governmental Clients

Established in 2006, Precision Consulting develops innovative, data-driven solutions for corporate, non-profit, and government clients. We help hundreds of clients each year tackle business, sociopolitical, and strategic problems through advanced statistical modeling techniques and using operational, client, market, institutional, and spatial data.

Many firms and agencies are not aware of the vast amounts of extant data that they can potentially harness in conjunction with their own data or unilaterally, to inform strategy and decision making at the highest levels. At Precision, we have methodological core competencies and subject matter expertise to help you optimally analyze your own in-house data, as well as leverage publicly available data for competitive advantage and performance.

Over 17 years of experience working with Fortune 500 clients

Expertise in a wide range of fields, from Biostatistics to Survey Methodology

Optimal analysis
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Data-Driven Decision Making for a Competitive Advantage

Whatever challenges your organization is currently facing, Precision Consulting can provide data-driven and evidence-based solutions using big data, machine learning, optimization methods, and simulation, in addition to trend, gap, conjoint analysis for market surveys, and numerous other relatively conventional evaluative and forecasting techniques. Our expertise is not limited to statistical analysis and runs the gamut of approaches for analyzing and organizing your qualitative content from focus groups, interviews, and open-ended survey items and online customer feedback.

Our Statistical Consulting Expertise

Firms, government agencies, and non-profits come to us requiring solutions to specific issues for which they require a data-driven decision calculus. At Precision, our first step is always to fully understand the problem and the data available to us for solving that problem. Given the type and amount of data available, both in-house as well as in the public domain, we determine the optimal statistical methodology for solving the problem. If a client does not have the data required to make sound operational and strategic decisions, our first step is to scan the “data landscape” to create a customized approach to developing the precise dataset your firm or agency requires to optimize decision making.

In fact, many of our statistical consulting projects and relationships begin after a firm or agency has already hired a traditional management consulting firm, which was unable to specify how to optimally solve the problem(s), or which proved unable to handle the level of quantitative rigor and creativity of the solution(s). We have a broad range of experience providing solutions through the application of a vast array of statistical and numerical methods, including survival and event history analysis, ARCH and GARCH models, neural nets, bootstrapping, Thurstone/Shapley analyses, structural equation modeling and multidimensional scaling, Monte Carlo simulations, conjoint analysis, contrarian analysis, and even machine learning approaches like LASSO, random forest, regression tree, and ensemble approaches.

Most recently, our statistical analysis work has ranged from creating and developing a working prototype of a predictive model for commercial real estate prices, to validating a complex survey aimed at assessing employees’ personality traits and competencies using Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling, to applying machine learning techniques to macroeconomic data for government agencies interested in forecasting regional migration patterns.

Our long experience and comfort with virtually all higher-level quantitative methodologies and our unparalleled expertise in applying these tools in organizational settings that span every industrial and economic sector enables us to assist you with virtually any problem. We are skilled with numerous modeling approaches and analytical tools, including but not limited to the following:

• Various forms of regression analysis, including non-linear regression and ridge regression
• Difference in differences analysis
• Survival analysis including Kaplan-Meier analysis
• Time series analysis, including vector autoregression (VAR), vector error-correction models (VECM), and GARCH and its variants (NGARCH, EGARCH, etc.)
• Panel analysis
• Regression discontinuity analysis
• Fuzzy regression discontinuity analysis
• Bayesian statistics
• Conjoint analysis
• Gap analysis
• Trend analysis
• Turf analysis
• Survey development and reliability/validity testing of existing surveys
• Contrarian analysis
• Statistical power analysis for sample size determination
• Multivariate analysis (with multiple outcome variables), such as MANOVA and MANCOVA.
• SWOT analysis
• Qualitative analysis protocols including thematic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and open-axial-selective coding
• Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)
• Optimization methods such as linear and nonlinear programming, genetic search, and simulated annealing
• Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and similar methods
• Nonparametric methods
• Zero-inflated count models
• Agent-based modeling
• Regression tree analysis
• LASSO
• Random forest analysis
• Ensemble analysis
• Principal components analysis
• TURF, Thurstone scaling, and Shapley values (used often in marketing-related projects)
• Conjoint analysis, choice modeling, and maximum difference scaling (MaxDiff)
• Meta-analysis
• Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), Confirmatory and Exploratory Factor Analysis (CFA and EFA), Multidimensional scaling, and path analysis
• Neural nets
• Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Parallel computing to handle very large datasets and for problems that would otherwise take excessive computing time
• Various bootstrapping and jackknife techniques
• Spatial analysis
• All statistical software packages, including R, Matlab, SAS, Stata, MPLUS, LISREL, EQS, PASS, Maple, Mathematica, and SPLUS
• Data mining with Weka and RapidMiner

No Data or Statistical Analysis is Too Complex: Our Commitment to You

At Precision, our motto is Nothing is Too Complex. We can perform any statistical test, predictive analysis, or simulation, regardless of the complexity, regardless of whether you currently have the data, and are not ever deterred by the complex, high-dimensional analytic tasks that conventional methods are ill-suited to address.

What’s more, we take pride in our ability to communicate our results in both a technical and an easy-to-understand manner. We don’t consider our job done until our clients completely understand our findings, how we arrived at them, why we took a specific methodological approach, and what the results mean for daily operations and/or longer-run strategic decision making.

Throughout our consulting process, we offer a substantial amount of client contact, to the extent that each client desires. As a result, our client relationships extend well beyond the delivery of a finished product, and we don’t consider an analysis to be completed if it isn’t intimately understood, and then applied—for industry and public sector, big and small, longtime clients and new customers alike.

The principals and analysts who comprise our statistical consulting team all come from outstanding careers in the corporate world and/or academia. Their collective human capital is the absolute pinnacle of the management consulting industry. Everyone on our team is at home and long-experienced in working with hard to manage, unwieldy, extremely large or “big,” and high-dimensional datasets. Our statistical consulting team is equally comfortable and just as highly engaged with smaller projects using relatively conventional data and methods of analysis. Just as no project is too big or challenging, neither is any project too small or straightforward for us to use our best and brightest when addressing your dataset development and analytic needs.

We work with each client on a case-by-case basis, considering timeline, goals, and budget, to develop a precise and rigorous statistical consulting plan that exceeds your expectations. Because of our customized approach to each project, we’re able to provide an affordable and highly individualized service for virtually any client budget, and our fees pale in comparison to the savings and additional profits that we produce for our clients. We ensure our clients avoid missteps like informing operational or strategic decision making with less than rigorous data and methods, inappropriate data and methods, or both, which often occurs when working with individual consultants and other firms lacking our elite training and experience.

As a cloud-based consulting firm, Precision operates on a flexible schedule, allowing us to work with our clients when it’s convenient for you. This operating model allows us to integrate our work into our lives and stay accessible to our clients whenever they need us. We passionately embrace new technologies and are at the forefront of quantitative consulting firms in terms of our technological capabilities and infrastructure.

More than 80% of our clients request our assistance more than once, as our clientele are almost universally highly satisfied with our customized application of statistical consulting to meet their operational and strategic needs. Since 2006, our primary goal at Precision is to provide you with successful and solutions-oriented approaches to harnessing information to inform your firm’s needs, with quantitative data development, statistical testing, and predictive modeling, and the development, coding, and systematic analysis of your qualitative content. Our initial consultation always includes a detailed, step-by-step scope of work to this end, and we always make any necessary modifications along the way, to ensure a comprehensive and robust analysis of your data and information.

Previous consulting projects include:

• Ratings methodology evaluation: A large American cable network requested statistical consulting to more accurately measure their viewers and improve advertising revenue. After a combination of resampling, simulation, and bootstrapping techniques, Precision showed that the ratings methodology used was grossly inaccurate. Based on our findings and report, the ratings agency changed the methodology used for networks of this type, and our client was able to increase their advertising prices back to previous levels.
• New model generation to account for missing data: In order to optimally impute missing values in a healthcare analytics Fortune 500 firm’s multi-gigabyte dataset due to a major retailer stopping the reporting of detailed sales data, our team designed an application for automatic model generation in R to capture the unique features of tens of thousands of products, and used cluster computing techniques to drastically reduce the amount of time needed to complete the task.
• Algorithm development for teacher placement: Assisting a large firm specializing in teacher placement, Precision created an assignment algorithm to place teachers in schools. Our team developed the outcome variable of teacher placement satisfaction, analyzed the drivers of that outcome variable, developed an algorithm to optimally place teachers given various constraints, and assessed the performance of the algorithm over repeated trials.
• Product comparison and analysis: A major water bottle manufacturing company hired us to analyze bottle weight data from a variety of product lines and compare to those of its competitors.We conducted the analysis and found a statistically significant difference in bottle weights, which our client used in a new advertising campaign.
• Product consistency analysis: A large producer of peanut butter contacted us to analyze the variance in the consistency of their product. After several visits to their factory, Precision’s team designed an experiment to collect the needed data. We then used principal component analysis to determine the likely sources of variation and their significance. Within 6 months, our findings framed a new initiative to increase the consistency of their product.
• Automated valuation tool: One of the world’s largest purchasers of domain names contacted us to build an algorithm to estimate the value of a given domain name prior to purchase from a vast dataset encompassing 10 years (several billion data points). They now use the resulting tool exclusively in all domain purchase decisions.
• Time-series model: A leading aircraft sales company in the United States contacted us to produce a time series model of aircraft prices and residual values for tax purposes. We created a comprehensive model that predicted the selling price and residual value of aircraft purchased over any given period of time from 1 to 50 years.
• Cybersecurity analysis: A primary cellular service provider about to combine various different online platforms into one unique platform needed to evaluate the probability that users of various different online platforms within their system could be using the same user/password combination, potentially enabling access to multiple accounts. We used techniques from information theory to assess the likelihood of specific sets of user/password combos being used by two different customers.
• Process variability: One of the world’s main solar cell manufacturers contacted us to design experiments and analyze the resulting data to increase internal knowledge of sources of variation within its fabrication process. We visited their factory, designed a series of complex experiments, and analyzed the results to reveal the main sources of variation in their process.
• Benefit services analysis: A Fortune 500 credit card company hired us to determine the optimal bundle of benefits to offer (and at what times) to their customers. We conducted a Shapley value analysis and provided it to the client, who then improved their benefits offerings in several ways.

Innovative, Expert-quality Statistical Consulting

At Precision, our goal, first and foremost, is to build long-term relationships with firms and agencies from all sectors of the global economy by delivering innovative, expert-quality statistical and predictive consulting. We’re committed to providing our services efficiently and effectively, on your timeline, not ours, for a competitive price, and sharing results in lay terms that accurately and appropriately incorporate technical language and terminology. We provide comprehensive statistical consulting and qualitative research and analysis support for datasets both big and small, using techniques both innovative and conventional, depending on your needs, and we tailor our methods and findings on a per-client basis, to meet your highly specific deliverable requirements.

As a result of our unique ability and willingness to provide tailored solutions to organizations’ information and decision-making needs, Precision’s clients include major Fortune 500 firms, national government entities across the globe, and elite research universities. However, we also take special note of opportunities to assist non-profits, small and medium business enterprises, and multiple subnational government agencies and liberal arts colleges and universities in the US and abroad.

What sets us apart from other statistical consulting firms is a unique core competency in developing creative solutions to strategic, operational, and performance questions. We’re equally expert in tackling issues faced by businesses in an ever-competitive and tumultuous marketplace, by non-profits and universities in an age of austerity, and by government departments and agencies in the face of contradictory conceptualizations of performance and efficacy.

Customized Data Analysis

We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to informing decision making in your firm or agency with quantitative data and/or qualitative content, but rather have the PhD-level expertise to create a customized approach that will optimize your use of the data and content you have internally and to maximize your access to and application of the data and content you need to acquire from without. The innovative approaches we take to dataset development and data analytics are typically outside the scope not only of our clients, but more importantly, our competitors.

Forecasting, Simulation, Big Data, Policy Analysis, and Program Evaluation

Even if your data, or the data you plan to acquire or develop, are incomplete, disorganized, unwieldy, or nonexistent, we have the long experience and subject matter expertise in business analytics, forecasting, simulation, big data, and policy analysis and program evaluation to meet your needs. Our statisticians can clean and code your data, and even impute and extrapolate missing and predictive values, in ways that are appropriate to your specific decision calculus. In other words, we consider your precise needs and take a contingency approach in our statistical consulting–rather than making assumptions about your organization that may apply in some industries and sectors of the economy, but not in others.

Unlike many larger firms, we adjust our resources and human capital allocations (along with software automation and a strong support staff) to keep our price quotes far lower than our competitors, while returning higher quality and innovative work in a shorter time frame. Our tailored statistical consulting and analysis support is always comprehensive with respect to client requests, and this per-project approach allows us to remain with clients to make any necessary adjustments after delivery at no additional cost. All relevant code and syntax are always provided among the final deliverables, for easy verification and clarification with our clients.