“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
W. Edwards Deming
Analytics is about finding the pattern, which is the second building block of the structure-pattern-perspective approach. Patterns identified through an analytical process provide insights for decision makers. Business analytics is a field that draws knowledge from various field, including Statistics, Operations Research, Computer Science, Mathematics, and others. Analytics models are generally divided into three categories as listed below.
- Descriptive analytics
- summary statistics: Percentage of potential voters supporting each candidate by gender and age groups.
- distribution analysis: Time distributions of physicians’ hospital rounding task times.
- Predictive analytics
- Clustering/Classification
- Forecasting
- Prescriptive analytics
- Linear/nonlinear optimization
- Network optimization