Real-World Data Mining: Applied Business Analytics and Decision Making

1. Introduction to Analytics

Business analytics is a relatively new term that is gaining popularity in the business world like nothing else in recent history. In general terms, analytics is the art and science of discovering insight—by using sophisticated mathematical models along with a variety of data and expert knowledge—to support solid, timely decision making. In a sense, analytics is all about decision making and problem solving. These days, analytics can be defined as simply as “the discovery of meaningful patterns in data.” In this era of abundant data, analytics tends to be used on large quantities and varieties of data. Although analytics tends to be data focused, many applications of analytics involve very little or no data; instead, ...