Elena Geminiani

Elena Geminiani

Business Analytics &
Data Science

ICONSULTING


Hello! I am a business analytics and data science professional at ICONSULTING. I am a Statistics PhD, and a former researcher in statistics and psychometrics, with experience at several universities including London School of Economics, University College London, KU Leuven, and University of Glasgow. I am enthusiastic about anything at the intersection between statistics and computational science, particularly predictive modelling, multivariate and latent variable models, and dimension reduction.

Interests

  • Statistical Modelling
  • Data Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Programming
  • Text Analysis
  • Data Visualization
  • Dimension Reduction

Education

  • PhD in Statistics, 2020

    University of Bologna

  • MSc in Statistical Science, 2016

    University of Bologna

  • BSc in Statistics (Double Degree), 2014

    University of Bologna, University of Glasgow

Skills

Data Science & Programming

R, Python, SPSS,
SAS, SQL, Git

Reporting &
Visualization

R Markdown, Power BI,
LaTeX, beamer

Soft Skills

Innovation, Fast learning,
Adaptability, Commitment,
Public Speaking, Technical Writing

Work experience

 
 
 
 
 

Business Analytics Specialist

ICONSULTING

Nov 2020 – Present Bologna
 
 
 
 
 

Statistics & Psychometrics researcher

University of Bologna

Oct 2019 – Sep 2020
  • Development of advanced parsimonious latent variable models
  • Data analysis: pre-processing, exploratory analysis, statistical modelling
  • Model implementation in R software
  • Creation of automatic reports
  • Writing of scientific publications
 
 
 
 
 

Statistics PhD

University of Bologna – LSE, UCL (London)

Oct 2016 – Sep 2019
  • Research: latent variable models, regularization and shrinkage, trust-region optimization, dimensionality reduction, psychometrics
  • Model implementation in an R package
  • Research periods at London School of Economics and University College London
  • Public speaking at international conferences
  • Writing of scientific publications
 
 
 
 
 

Teaching Assistant

University of Bologna

Sep 2014 – Sep 2020
  • Tutor in 3 undergraduate and postgraduate courses on fundamentals of statistics and latent variable models.
  • Lectures, lab and class practicals
  • Exam invigilation and office hour

International research experience

 
 
 
 
 

Visitor research student

University College London (UCL)

Nov 2018 – Jun 2019 London, UK
Preparation of the doctoral dissertation.
 
 
 
 
 

Erasmus+ PhD student

London School of Economics (LSE)

Jan 2018 – Jun 2018 London, UK
Preparation of the doctoral dissertation.
 
 
 
 
 

Visiting Scholar

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU)

Feb 2016 – May 2016 Leuven, Belgium
Preparation of the Master’s thesis.
 
 
 
 
 

Erasmus student

University of Glasgow

Sep 2013 – May 2014 Glasgow, UK
Fourth-year attendance of the Bachelor in Statistical Sciences, preparation of the Bachelor thesis and graduation.

Accomplish­ments

Introduction to Power BI

Datacamp Sep 2020
Load and transform data using Power Query, creating visualizations, making reports fully interactive, using DAX formulas to create customized calculated columns and fields.
See certificate

Introduction to Deep Learning in Python

Datacamp Sep 2020
Deep Learning and neural networks, optimizing a neural network with backpropagation, building deep learning models with keras, fine-tuning keras models.
See certificate

Supervised Learning with scikit-learn

Datacamp Sep 2020
Classification, regression, fine-tuning models, preprocessing and pipelines.
See certificate

Machine Learning with Big Data

Coursera • UC San Diego Jul 2020
Machine Learning, Knime, Apache Spark.
See certificate

Big Data Integration and Processing

Coursera • UC San Diego Jul 2020
Big Data, MongoDB, Splunk, Apache Spark.
See certificate

Big Data Modeling and Management Systems

Coursera • UC San Diego Jul 2020
Data Model, Big Data, Data Modeling, Data Management.
See certificate

Introduction to Big Data

Coursera • UC San Diego Jul 2020
Big Data, Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, Cloudera.
See certificate

Essential Design Principles for Tableau

Coursera • University of California, Davis Jul 2020
Improve an ineffective visualization, apply visualization best practices, design visualizations that work best for the target audience.
See certificate

Fundamentals of Visualization via Tableau

Coursera • University of California, Davis Jul 2020
Navigate the Tableau Public workspace, create a visualization, connect to different data sources.
See certificate

SQL for Data Science

Coursera • University of California, Davis Jul 2020
Use SQL commands to filter, sort, and summarize data. Use the UNION operator. Manipulate strings, dates, and numeric data.
See certificate

SAS Certified Predictive Modeler Using SAS Enterprise Miner 13

SAS Sep 2015
Enterprise Miner, Logistic Regression, Model Assessment, Neural Networks, Predictive Modeling.
See certificate

SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9

SAS Mar 2015
Base SAS, SAS Data Sets, SAS Functions, SAS Programming, SAS System Reportings.
See certificate

Awards & Scholarships

Research fellowship

University of Bologna Oct 2019 – Sep 2020
One-year fellowship funded by GRADUA (GRaduates Advancement and Development of University capacities in Albania).

Marco Polo scholarship

University of Bologna Nov 2018
Five-month scholarship for research periods abroad aimed at the preparation of the doctoral dissertation at the Department of Statistical Science, University College London (UCL), London.

ACTNext Travel Award

ACTNext Jul 2018
Travel Award to support travel to the International Meeting of the Psychometric Society (IMPS 2018) at Columbia University, New York.

Erasmus+ scholarship

University of Bologna Oct 2017
Study scholarship for research periods abroad aimed at the preparation of the doctoral dissertation at the Department of Statistics, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London.

PhD scholarship

University of Bologna Oct 2016
Scholarship for the PhD program in Statistics at the University of Bologna.

Study award

University of Bologna Jul 2016
Study award in favor of worthy students of the University of Bologna.

Master’s thesis scholarship

University of Bologna Oct 2015
Scholarship for research periods abroad aimed at the preparation of the Master’s thesis at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven.

Erasmus scholarship

University of Bologna Jul 2013
Scholarship for study periods abroad aimed at the abroad preparation of the Bachelor thesis at the Department of Mathematics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow.

Projects

*
All Dataviz Data Analysis Text mining Dimension reduction Factor analysis

Anomaly detection of Wastewater Treatment Plant

Classification of the operational states of a wastewater treatment plant through clustering (hierarchical, partitioning, model-based, and modal clustering), hidden Markov models, and dimension reduction methods.

BBC Music Best Hip Hop Songs

Exploration of the best hip hop songs, analysis of their audio features obtained from the Spotify API, exploratory factor analysis and dimension reduction.

Cross-cultural differences in emotions

Apply mixture simultaneous factor analysis and hypothesis testing to classify countries on the basis of the cultural appropriateness of particular emotions.

Image processing of Raphael’s Artwork

Non-negative matrix factorization for optimal compression of the painting Madonna del Cardellino through a low-rank approximation of the pixel intensities matrix.

MoMA artwork collection

Data analysis of the characteristics of the artwork pieces displayed at MoMA (New York).

Penalized estimation of factor models

Codes and tools to estimate penalized factor models through approximations of convex (e.g., lasso, adaptive lasso) and non-convex (e.g., scad, mcp) penalties.

Projects on Kaggle

Personal notebooks and analyses available at Kaggle, the Data Science and Machine Learning Community.

Sparsity & Psychometrics

Assessment of students’ psychological abilities through a properly estimated penalized multiple-group factor analysis model.

Text analysis of Shakespeare’s works

Recover the latent topics in the complete works by Shakespeare and classify the document corpus accordingly.

Text Mining The Simpsons

Exploration of the most popular characters, locations, and guest stars, analysis of TV ratings, votes and episodes views, text analysis on the dialogues, sentiment analysis, topic modelling.

Talks

  • Social Statistics Seminar at the London School of Economics (LSE) on “A penalized likelihood-based approach for single and multiple-group factor analysis models”, London, UK (Nov 2019).

  • Talk at International Meeting of the Psychometric Society (IMPS) on “Sparse Multigroup Factor Analysis”, Columbia University, New York City, USA (Jul 2018).

  • ACTNext Tech Talk on “Sparse Multigroup Factor Analysis for Continuous and Categorical Data” at ACTNext, Iowa City, USA (Jul 2018). See post on Twitter.

Publications

  • Geminiani, E., Ceulemans, E., & De Roover, K. (2020). Testing for factor loading differences in mixture simultaneous factor analysis: a Monte Carlo simulation-based perspective. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 1-19. DOI: 10.1080/10705511.2020.1807351

  • Geminiani, E. (2020). A penalized likelihood-based framework for single and multiple-group factor analysis models (Doctoral dissertation, University of Bologna). DOI: 10.6092/unibo/amsdottorato/9355 Available at http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/9355/.

Contact