BUSINESS DATA LESSON 1 : Introduction to

Data Analytics

ANALYTIC
 Define data sources

Define the value of data

COURSE
OBJECTIVES What is the competitive
advantages

Define type of analytic

and analytic methods
DATA ANALYTICS:
Data analytics (DA) is the process of examining data sets in order to
draw conclusions about the information they contain, increasingly with the
aid of specialized systems and software. Data analytics technologies and
techniques are widely used in commercial industries to enable
organizations to make more-informed business decisions and by scientists
and researchers to verify or disprove scientific models, theories and
hypotheses.
Steps in data analytics:
✓ Defines data sources
✓ Defines the value of data
✓ What is the competitive advantages
✓ Define type of analytics
✓ Define which analytic Methods on data
THE STRUCTURE OF BIG DATA
❖Structured
• Most traditional data sources

❖Semi-structured
• Many sources of big data

❖Unstructured
• Video data, audio data

5
• Visiting these three websites adds three URLs to the log files monitoring the user’s computer or network use. These three URLs
are:
• https://www.google.com/#q=EMC+data+science
• https://education.emc.com/guest/campaign/data_science.aspx
• https://education.emc.com/guest/certification/framework/stf/data_science.aspx
• this comprises a clickstream that can be parsed and mined by data scientists to discover usage
patterns and uncover relationships among clicks and areas of interest on a website or group of sites.
THE RISE OF BIG DATA SOURCES
 The value of Data
Smarter Multi-channel
Healthcare sales

Homeland Telecom
Security

Trading
Traffic Control Analytics

Search
Manufacturing Quality
4 TYPES OF ANALYTICS
DESCRIPTIVE ANALYTICS
▪Descriptive analytics answers the question of WHAT
HAPPENED.
▪Examples:
▪ a healthcare provider will learn how many patients were hospitalized last
month;
▪ a retailer – the average weekly sales volume;
▪ a manufacturer – a rate of the products returned for a past month
▪Descriptive analytics juggles raw data from multiple data
sources to give valuable insights into the past.
▪Disadvantage: These findings simply SIGNAL that something is
WRONG or RIGHT, without explaining why.
▪For this reason, highly data-driven companies do not content
themselves with descriptive analytics only and prefer combining
it with other types of data analytics.
DIAGNOSTIC ANALYTICS
▪Historical data can be measured against other data to answer the
question of WHY SOMETHING HAPPENED.
▪Diagnostic analytics are used to discover or determined by using drill
down, find out dependencies and identify patterns.
▪Companies go for diagnostic analytics as it gives in-depth insights into
a particular problem.
▪Examples:
▪ Used in social media marketing campaign – assess number of posts, mentions,
followers, fans, page view.
▪ retailer can drill the sales and gross profit down to categories to find out why they
missed their net profit target.
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
▪Predictive analytics tells WHAT IS LIKELY TO HAPPEN.
▪It uses the findings of descriptive and diagnostic analytics to detect
tendencies, clusters and exceptions, and to predict future trends, which
makes it a valuable tool for forecasting.
▪Despite numerous advantages that predictive analytics brings, it is
essential to understand that forecasting is just an estimate, the accuracy of
which highly depends on data quality and stability of the situation, so it
requires careful treatment and continuous optimization.
▪Examples:
▪ A telecom company, for instance, can identify the subscribers who are most likely to reduce
their spend and trigger targeted marketing activities to remediate
▪ A management team can weigh the risks of investing in their company’s expansion based on
cash flow analysis and forecasting.

▪Properly tunes predictive analytics can be used to support sales,

marketing or other types of complex forecast.
PRESCRIPTIVE ANALYTICS
▪Prescriptive analytics is to literally prescribe WHAT ACTION TO
TAKE to eliminate a future problem or take full advantage of a
promising trend.
▪Example:
▪ A multinational company was able to identify opportunities for repeat purchases
based on customer analytics and sales history.

▪Prescriptive analytics uses advanced tools and technologies, like

machine learning, business rules and algorithms, which makes it
sophisticated to implement and manage.
▪That is why, before deciding to adopt prescriptive analytics, a
company should compare required efforts vs. an expected added
value.
CASE STUDY: TARGET
After analyzing consumer purchasing behavior, Target’s statisticians determined
that the retailer made a great deal of money from three main life-event situations.
● Marriage, when people tend to buy many new products
● Divorce, when people buy new products and change their spending habits
● Pregnancy, when people have many new things to buy and have an urgency to
buy them
Target determined that the most lucrative of these life-events is the third situation:
pregnancy. Using data collected from shoppers, Target was able to identify this
fact and predict which of its shoppers were pregnant. In one case, Target knew a
female shopper was pregnant even before her family knew [5]. This kind of
knowledge allowed Target to offer specific coupons and incentives to their
pregnant shoppers. In fact, Target could not only determine if a shopper was
pregnant, but in which month of pregnancy a shopper may be. This enabled
Target to manage its inventory, knowing that there would be demand for specific
products and it would likely vary by month over the coming nine- to ten-month
cycles.
WHO ARE THE PEOPLE
INVOLVED IN
BUSSINES DATA
ANALYTICS AND WHAT
IS YOUR ROLE??
FINAL EXAM: JAN 2018
FINAL EXAM: JUNE 2018
FINAL EXAM: JULY 2017