{"id":603,"date":"2009-03-13T09:45:28","date_gmt":"2009-03-13T13:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=603"},"modified":"2009-03-13T09:45:28","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T13:45:28","slug":"bernie-madoff-and-data-visualization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/03\/13\/bernie-madoff-and-data-visualization\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernie Madoff and Data Visualization"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you are like most people, when you hear of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme ripping off investors to the tune of $50 billion, you might think “Oh those poor investors”, or perhaps “Just the rich ripping off the other rich”.\u00a0 If you do research in a business school, you might wonder about the institutional controls that allowed for such a long-term scam.\u00a0 But if you are in operations research, you probably think:\u00a0 what a great source of data!\u00a0 I wonder what I can do with that?<\/p>\n

A couple of the results of the last question (thanks Bryan<\/a>!):\u00a0 GeoCommons <\/a>(“Visual Analytics through Maps”) have a very cool map of Madoff’s investors<\/a>.\u00a0 While the map doesn’t contain any information that is not part of the 162 page listing of investors, the visualization leads to lots of interesting questions:\u00a0 why so much around Denver?\u00a0 Why so little in Asia?\u00a0 If there was one person in Auckland, New Zealand involved, is it surprising it was in Parnell?\u00a0 And who was that guy in Northern Canada who got ripped off, eh?\u00a0 (The latter appears to be a misplacement:\u00a0 there is a Lac Carre outside of Montreal).\u00a0 Other maps are here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Network
Network from The Network Thinker<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even better is the growing analysis of the social network involved in the Madoff scam.\u00a0 The Network Thinker<\/a> has a great graph pointing out who invested with whom (there is also an interactive map<\/a>).\u00a0 This leads to all sorts of graph theoretic questions:\u00a0 what is the longest path in the graph?\u00a0 What do components of the graph (minus Madoff) correspond to?\u00a0 Are there cliques or near-cliques in the graph?<\/p>\n

This is great data that I am sure will be used in countless dissertations over the next years.\u00a0 It probably wasn’t worth $50 billion to get that data, but we might as well use it now that we have it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you are like most people, when you hear of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme ripping off investors to the tune of $50 billion, you might think “Oh those poor investors”, or perhaps “Just the rich ripping off the other rich”.\u00a0 If you do research in a business school, you might wonder about the institutional controls … Continue reading “Bernie Madoff and Data Visualization”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-mining","category-social-capital"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}