Cabela's Moves from CHAID to CART (1,105 words)

Making the Cut

The final step in building the Spring 1998 mailing-list model was to score the cases and to determine the cut-off point for contacts that would be sent the catalog and those that would not. In previous years' models, the final scores were segmented into 10 parts with an equal number of contacts in each, and a cut-off was determined. A shortcoming to that method was that low-level performance segments showed little difference between one another: They were simply a large concentration of a buying population broken into more than one part. This made for a higher risk of excluding profitable contacts while including less-profitable ones. CART models were able to solve this challenge and define a good cut-off point.