Building decision trees for marketing campaigns

How can the influence of different variables on a target variable be analyzed? In this example, we analyze an engineering college’s fundraising campaign, and build decision trees to help us optimize its efficiency, so as to plan a follow-up snail mail campaign. We also explain how the same technique can be applied to other types of data.

Analyzed data:

The following fundraising campaign variables were made available by an engineering college:

• Graduation year
• Department (ex: “Computer Science”)
• Region (ex: “South East”)
• Faternity (ex: “Phi Kappa Sigma”)
• Current employment (ex: “Government”)
• Degree (ex: “Bachelors”)
• GPA
• Email response
• Amount pledged