Business Analytics

Professor Uday Kulkarni

Arizona State University
Moving from Querying to Analysis to Mining

Querying Analysis Data Mining

Extraction of Knowledge discovery

Summaries and
detailed and of hidden patterns
trends
summary data

“Reporting” “Analysis” “Insight and

prediction”

Who purchased What is the income Who is likely to buy a

mutual funds in the distribution of mutual fund in the next
last 3 years? mutual fund buyers? 6 months and why?
A Framework for Data-Analytic Thinking

Recognize a (recurring) business process that can

benefit from data analytics
1

Decompose it into tasks such that some task matches a

known task for which an analytical technique exists
2

Envision how the results will be incorporated into the

tasks to improve the overall business process
3

Determine what performance metrics will measure the

improvement in the task, business process, business
4
 Analytical Techniques – The Basic Data Mining Models

Supervised Learning Unsupervised Learning

Predictive Modeling Descriptive Modeling

Classification Regression Clustering

Decision Trees, Linear Classification

Binary or Class
Rank Order
Multiclass Probability
 What do we do in the class?

 Discussions of case studies and other readings

 Instructor presentations on analytical modeling
 In-class work
 Student team presentations
 What do you do outside the class?

 Read the book chapters, case studies, and other

readings and prepare for class discussion
 Do homework
 Do data mining team project(s)
 Complete the final team project
By the end of the course you will be able to…
 Identify a business process that can benefit from innovative use of data
analytics
 Propose a new analytical enhancement to the business process
 Describe analytical technique that you will use for the enhancement
 Identify the data needed for performing the analytics, including the
sources of data
 Identify the performance metrics that you’ll use to measure the
improvement in the performance of the business process
 Design an experiment to test the improvement in the performance
specifically due to the analytical enhancement to the business process
 Identify the changes in the normal workflow of the participants
executing the business process
Text Book