Refik Soyer, Joshua Landon, Fabrizio Ruggeri and Murat Tarimcilar. Modeling Latent Sources in Call Center Arrivals

Abstract. In this paper, we present certain issues that arise in the analysis of call center arrivals that are mostly linked to individual ads. More specifically, we consider the case where there is no complete linkage between the calls and the advertisements that led to the calls. The ability to model and infer such latent call arrival sources is important from a marketing as well as an operations point of view since knowledge of the linkage improves forecasting performance of the models. We present a modulated nonhomogeneous Poisson process with latent components describing the arrival sources. In analyzing call arrival data, we pose this as a missing data problem and develop a data augmentation  algorithm for the Bayesian analysis.