Data Science: Business Analytics (Definitions)

"Meta-data that includes data definitions, report definitions, users, usage statistics, and performance statistics." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"Provides models, which are formulas or algorithms and procedures to BI." (Linda Volonino & Efraim Turban, "Information Technology for Management "8th Ed, 2011)

"The process of leveraging all forms of analytics to achieve business outcomes by requiring business relevancy, actionable insight, performance management, and value measurement." (Evan Stubbs, "Delivering Business Analytics: Practical Guidelines for Best Practice", 2013)

"Application of analytical tools to business questions. Business Analytics focuses on developing insights and understanding related to business performance using quantitative and statistical methods. Business Analytics includes Business Intelligence and Reporting." (Daniel J Power & Ciara Heavin, "Decision Support, Analytics, and Business Intelligence" 3rd Ed., 2017)

"BA is a data-driven decision making approach that uses statistical and quantitative analysis, information technology, and management science (mathematical modeling, simulation), along with data mining and fact-based data to measure past business performance to guide an organization in business planning and effective decision making." (Amar Sahay, "Business Analytics" Vol. I, 2018) 

"Use of data and quantitative and qualitative tools and techniques to improve operations and to support business decision ­making. Emphasis on using statistical and management science techniques, including data mining, to develop predictive and prescriptive models." (Daniel J. Power & Ciara Heavin, "Data-Based Decision Making and Digital Transformation", 2018)

"Aggregated information on business processes that enables managers to analyze process trends, view performance metrics, and respond to organizational change." (Appian)

"Refers to the skills, technologies, and practices for investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. It focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. While business intelligence (BI) focuses on a consistent set of metrics to both measure past performance and guide business planning, business analytics is focused on developing new insights and understanding based on statistical methods and predictive modeling." (Insight Software)

"Business Analytics describes the skills, technologies, statistical methods and data driven approaches used to explore and investigate past business performance to gain new insights that can support business planning." (Accenture)

"Business analytics is comprised of solutions used to build analysis models and simulations to create scenarios, understand realities and predict future states. Business analytics includes data mining, predictive analytics, applied analytics and statistics, and is delivered as an application suitable for a business user." (Gartner)

"Business analytics (BA) is the iterative, methodical exploration of an organization's data, with an emphasis on statistical analysis." (Techtarget) [source] 

"Business Analytics is the process by which businesses use statistical methods and technologies for analyzing historical data in order to gain new insight and improve strategic decision-making." (OmiSci) [source]

"Business analytics is the process of gathering and processing all of your business data, and applying statistical models and iterative methodologies to translate that data into business insights." (Tibco) [source]

"Describes the skills, technologies, statistical methods and data driven approaches used to explore and investigate past business performance to gain new insights that can support business planning. Examples of business analytics tools include data visualization, business intelligence reporting and big data platforms." (Accenture)

Umesh R Hodeghatta - Collected Quotes

"A histogram represents the frequency distribution of the data. Histograms are similar to bar charts but group numbers into ranges. Also, a histogram lets you show the frequency distribution of continuous data. This helps in analyzing the distribution (for example, normal or Gaussian), any outliers present in the data, and skewness." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"Bias occurs normally when the model is underfitted and has failed to learn enough from the training data. It is the difference between the mean of the probability distribution and the actual correct value. Hence, the accuracy of the model is different for different data sets (test and training sets). To reduce the bias error, data scientists repeat the model-building process by resampling the data to obtain better prediction values." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"Clustering analysis is performed on data to identify hidden groups or to form different sectors. The objective of the clusters is to enable meaningful analysis in ways that help business. Clustering can uncover previously undetected relationships in a data set." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"Correlation explains the extent of change in one of the variables given the unit change in the value of another variable. Correlation assumes a very significant role in statistics and hence in the field of business analytics as any business cannot make any decision without understanding the relationship between various forces acting in favor of or against it." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"Graphs represent data visually and provide more details about the data, enabling you to identify outliers in the data, distribute data for each column variable, provide a statistical description of the data, and present the relationship between the two or more variables." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"If either bias or variance is high, the model can be very far off from reality. In general, there is a trade-off between bias and variance. The goal of any machine-learning algorithm is to achieve low bias and low variance such that it gives good prediction performance. In reality, because of so many other hidden parameters in the model, it is hard to calculate the real bias and variance error. Nevertheless, the bias and variance provide a measure to understand the behavior of the machine-learning algorithm so that the model model can be adjusted to provide good prediction performance." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"In machine learning, a model is defined as a function, and we describe the learning function from the training data as inductive learning. Generalization refers to how well the concepts are learned by the model by applying them to data not seen before. The goal of a good machine-learning model is to reduce generalization errors and thus make good predictions on data that the model has never seen." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"Machine learning is about making computers learn and perform tasks better based on past historical data. Learning is always based on observations from the data available. The emphasis is on making computers build mathematical models based on that learning and perform tasks automatically without the intervention of humans." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"Overfitting and underfitting are two important factors that could impact the performance of machine-learning models. Overfitting occurs when the model performs well with training data and poorly with test data. Underfitting occurs when the model is so simple that it performs poorly with both training and test data. [...]  When the model does not capture and fit the data, it results in poor performance. We call this underfitting. Underfitting is the result of a poor model that typically does not perform well for any data." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)

"Variance is a prediction error due to different sets of training samples. Ideally, the error should not vary from one training sample to another sample, and the model should be stable enough to handle hidden variations between input and output variables. Normally this occurs with the overfitted model." (Umesh R Hodeghatta & Umesha Nayak, "Business Analytics Using R: A Practical Approach", 2017)