Dr. John Elder is Chief Scientist of Elder Research, Inc. (ERI) -- a team of Data Mining consultants in Charlottesville and Falls Church, Virginia (www.datamininglab.com).

After earning Electrical Engineering degrees from Rice University (1983, 1984) John was a “rocket scientist” for an innovative Defense consulting firm (Barron Associates, Inc., 1984-1989), where he developed adaptive flight control and guidance systems and authored an influential inductive modeling algorithm, employing polynomial networks, for the U.S. Air Force. John then earned a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia (1993), while directing research for a quantitative investment management company (Delta Financial, Inc., 1989-1993). His dissertation, inspired by financial modeling challenges, introduced the then most efficient algorithm for low-dimensional, but multimodal, global optimization. Dr. Elder returned to Rice, with National Science Foundation support, to the Computational and Applied Mathematics department (1993-1995), where he wrote an advanced Decision Tree algorithm, and developed a popular course on the emerging interdisciplinary field of Data Mining. There, he had his first breakthroughs in the use of multiple, diverse models to improve prediction accuracy.

Since 1995, John has led ERI’s successful projects -- in credit scoring, direct marketing, sales forecasting, stock selection, image pattern recognition, drug efficacy estimation, volatility forecasting, fraud detection, biometrics, and market timing. Dr. Elder writes and speaks widely on pattern discovery techniques and is active on Statistical and Engineering journals and boards.

Since the fall of 2001, he has been honored to serve on a congressionally-appointed panel guiding technology at a division of the National Security Agency.