Drill Down to Ask Why, Part 1

Suppose that you work for an airline as a fare planner.

.. Imagine five ways in which the fare planner might ask why. I’ll arrange these in order of increasing breadth and complexity:

  1. Give me more detail. Run the same yield report, but break down the high-level routes by dates, time of day, aircraft type, fare class and other attributes of the original yield calculation.
  2. Give me a comparison. Run the same yield report, but this time compare to a previous time period or to competitive yield data if it is available.
  3. Let me search for other factors. Jump to nonyield databases, such as a weather database, a holiday/special events database, a marketing promotions database or a competitive pricing database to see if any of these exogenous factors could have played a role.
  4. Tell me what explains the variance. Perform a data mining analysis, perhaps using decision trees, examining hundreds of marketplace conditions to see which of these conditions correlates most strongly with the drop in yield (explaining the variance in data mining terminology).
  5. Search the Web for information about the problem. Google or Yahoo! the Web for “airline yield 2008 versus 2007.”