SECTION D: CASE 30 points 1 case 30% 60 minutes Please read the case and answer the questions of the case. How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did Kashmir Hill Every time you go shopping you share intim ate details about your consumption pattems with retailers. And many of those retailers are studyingthose details to figure out what you like, what youneed, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the waylong before you needto start buying diapers. Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents to be at that crucialmoment before they turn into rampant -- and loyal-- buyers of all things pastel plastic, and miniature. He talkedto Target statistician Andrew Pole -- before Target freaked out andcut off all communications-- about the cluesto a customer'simpending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everythingthey've bought andany demographic information Target has collectedfrom them or boughtfrom other sources. Usingthat, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target babyregistries in the past. From the NYT: Pole ran test after test, analyzingthe data and before longsome useful patterns emerged Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole's colleaguesnoticed that women on the baby registry were buyinglarger quantities of unscentedlotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst notedthat sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loadedup on supplements like calcium, magnesium andzinc. Mary shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buyinglots of scent-free soap and extra- big bags of cotton balls, in addition to handsaritizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date. Or have a rather nasty infection.. As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assigneach shopper a "pregnancy prediction" score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timedto very specific stages of her pregnancy