Wouter Verbeke

Wouter Verbeke, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of data analytics and business informatics at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). He graduated in 2007 as a Civil civil Engineer engineer and obtained a Ph.D. in applied economics at KU Leuven (Belgium) in 2012. In 2013, he joined VU Brussel were he founded and leads the data analytics laboratory (www.data-lab.be).

His research is mainly situated in the field of predictive, prescriptive, and network analytics, and is driven by real-life business problems, including applications in customer relationship, credit risk, fraud, supply chain, and human resources management. Specifically, his research focuses on taking into account costs and benefits in developing and evaluating business analytics applications. Another key research topic is uplift modeling and prescriptive analytics. Wouter teaches several courses on information systems and advanced modeling for decision making to business students, and provides training to business practitioners on customer analytics, credit risk modeling, and fraud analytics. He has been setting up and carrying out research projects with a range of companies from the financial, ICT, and HR services industry.

His work has been published in established international scientific journals such as IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, European Journal of Operational Research, and Decision Support Systems. He is also author of the book Fraud Analytics Using Descriptive, Predictive & Social Network Techniques —The essential guide to Data Science for Fraud Detection, published by Wiley in 2015, and the book Profit-Driven Business Analytics, published by Wiley in September 2017. In 2014, he won the distinguished EURO award for best article published in the European Journal of Operational Research in the category “Innovative Applications of O.R.”