Dr. Dietrich Fricke Prize for Benjamin Stahl

The Erich-Gutenberg-Arbeitsgemeinschaft Köln e.V. has awarded the Dr. Dietrich Fricke Prize 2018, established by the TENTE Foundation, to Benjamin Stahl, graduate of the Goethe University and current ING-DiBa employee.

This prize, endowed with 500,- €, is awarded to graduates of economic study programmes who have written a remarkable theses to solve decision-making problems in companies.

Benjamin Stahl's master thesis "Variable Importance Measures in Tree-based Classification Algorithms Applied to Decision Problems in Marketing", jointly supervised by the Professors Schmidberger and Skiera as well as Gabriela Alves Werb, developed a new method for measuring the strength and the direction of the effects of independent variables in machine learning processes, in particular decision trees and random forests. He applied this new method in an empirical study to customer and transaction data from ING-DiBa and determined which variables influence the opening of a current account. He showed that his new method lead to valid results and provided new insights for ING-DiBa. His outstanding work thus makes a significant and original contribution to marketing and machine learning, as it helps to interpret the results of machine learning processes even better.

Congratulations!