{"id":73735,"date":"2025-08-20T13:00:23","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T13:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=73735"},"modified":"2025-08-20T13:00:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T13:00:23","slug":"nigerian-phd-student-builds-transparent-ai-model-for-e-commerce-forecasting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2025\/08\/20\/nigerian-phd-student-builds-transparent-ai-model-for-e-commerce-forecasting\/","title":{"rendered":"Nigerian PhD Student Builds Transparent AI Model for E-Commerce Forecasting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Onilede Titi Faith<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Deborah Okoli, a Nigerian PhD student in Applied Mathematics at Mississippi State University, has developed a transparent machine learning model designed to make e-commerce forecasting more reliable for businesses and policymakers.<\/p>\n<p>Okoli said her research focuses on \u201clag-aware\u201d machine learning, which not only identifies economic drivers such as productivity, R&amp;D, sales, and employment but also shows the timing of their impact.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy goal is to build models leaders can question and trust; models that don\u2019t just give answers but explain how they got there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike traditional \u201cblack-box\u201d AI, her system applies explainability tools like feature attribution and partial dependence plots to reveal how each factor influences forecasts.<\/p>\n<p>She stressed that accountability in AI forecasting is key: \u201cForecasts should come with seatbelts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Okoli, a First-Class graduate of Covenant University, has also studied at Tennessee Tech University and the University of Hull, UK.<\/p>\n<p>At Mississippi State, she works with Professors Kim Seongjai and Jason Shin to develop forecasting templates adaptable to real-world data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Onilede Titi Faith &nbsp; Deborah Okoli, a Nigerian PhD student in Applied Mathematics at Mississippi State University, has developed a transparent machine learning model designed to make e-commerce forecasting more reliable for businesses and policymakers. Okoli said her research focuses on \u201clag-aware\u201d machine learning, which not only identifies economic drivers such as productivity, R&amp;D, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":73736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172,180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73735"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73737,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73735\/revisions\/73737"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}