“Business analytics depends on analysis of sufficient volumes of high quality data. The amount of data available nowadays is huge and running into thousands of peta-bytes. Harnessing this data to make better informed decisions is what business analytics is. With improvements in technology and also implementation of statistical and quantitative techniques, querying and analysis of this huge amount of data is almost done in real-time today. Business analytics takes advantage of statistical and quantitative data for explanatory, predictive and prescriptive modeling. It focuses on solution-oriented systems which create value by converting information into knowledge. With the growing importance of Big data(large volumes of data generated, both in structured and unstructured form), Business Analytics is a fast growing market which includes complex applications such as enterprise information and performance management, data warehousing, data mining, Business Intelligence (BI), business risk compliance and governance among others.
All such applications under business analytics can be broadly classified into three stages -Descriptive or Diagnostic Analytics, Predictive Analytics and Prescriptive Analytics.
Descriptive or Diagnostic Analytics is the traditional form of analytics which looks at past performance and understands that performance, by analyzing historical data to look for the reasons behind past successes or failures. This stage deals with questions such as what happened in the past and why it happened.
The predictive analytics market is estimated to be at $ 1.9 Bn in 2013, and expected to grow at a CAGR of 15% for the next five years, to reach $ 4.4 Bn by 2018.
Predictive Analytics is the second stage of business analytics which answers the question what will happen in the future. In this stage, data from historical performances is combined with rules, algorithms, and external data to determine the probable future outcome of an event or the...