Data Mining for Business Analytics

Concepts, Techniques, and Applications in R

Galit Shmueli, Peter C. Bruce, Inbal Yahav, Nitin R. Patel, Kenneth C. Lichtendahl

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118879337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Matemáticas
• Subtopic: Probabilidad y estadística

Data Mining for Business Analytics: Concepts, Techniques, and Applications in R presents an applied approach to data mining concepts and methods, using R software for illustration

Readers will learn how to implement a variety of popular data mining algorithms in R (a free and open-source software) to tackle business problems and opportunities.

This is the fifth version of this successful text, and the first using R. It covers both statistical and machine learning algorithms for prediction, classification, visualization, dimension reduction, recommender systems, clustering, text mining and network analysis. It also includes:

• Two new co-authors, Inbal Yahav and Casey Lichtendahl, who bring both expertise teaching business analytics courses using R, and data mining consulting experience in business and government
• Updates and new material based on feedback from instructors teaching MBA, undergraduate, diploma and executive courses, and from their students
• More than a dozen case studies demonstrating applications for the data mining techniques described
• End-of-chapter exercises that help readers gauge and expand their comprehension and competency of the material presented
• A companion website with more than two dozen data sets, and instructor materials including exercise solutions, PowerPoint slides, and case solutions www.dataminingbook.com

Data Mining for Business Analytics: Concepts, Techniques, and Applications in R is an ideal textbook for graduate and upper-undergraduate level courses in data mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. This new edition is also an excellent reference for analysts, researchers, and practitioners working with quantitative methods in the fields of business, finance, marketing, computer science, and information technology.

PART I
Preliminaries

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

1.1 What Is Business Analytics?

Business Analytics (BA) is the practice and art of bringing quantitative data to bear on decision-making. The term means different things to different organizations.

Consider the role of analytics in helping newspapers survive the transition to a digital world. One tabloid newspaper with a working-class readership in Britain had launched a web version of the paper, and did tests on its home page to determine which images produced more hits: cats, dogs, or monkeys. This simple application, for this company, was considered analytics. By contrast, the Washington Post has a highly influential audience that is of interest to big defense contractors: it is perhaps the only newspaper where you routinely see advertisements for aircraft carriers. In the digital environment, the Post can track readers by time of day, location, and user subscription information. In this fashion, the display of the aircraft carrier advertisement in the online paper may be focused on a very small group of individuals—say, the members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees who will be voting on the Pentagon’s budget.

Business Analytics, or more generically, analytics, include a range of data analysis methods. Many powerful applications involve little more than counting, rule-checking, and basic arithmetic. For some organizations, this is what is meant by analytics.

The next level of business analytics, now termed Business Intelligence (BI), refers to data visualization and reporting for understanding “what happened and what is happening.” This is done by use of charts, tables, and dashboards to display, examine, and explore data. BI, which earlier consisted mainly of generating static reports, has evolved into more user-friendly and effective tools and practices, such as creating interactive dashboards that allow the user not only to access real-time data, but also to directly interact with it. Effective dashboards are those that tie directly into company data, and give managers a tool to quickly see what might not readily be apparent in a large complex database. One such tool for industrial operations managers displays customer orders in a single two-dimensional display, using color and bubble size as added variables, showing customer name, type of product, size of order, and length of time to produce.

Business Analytics now typically includes BI as well as sophisticated data analysis methods, such as statistical models and data mining algorithms used for exploring data, quantifying and explaining relationships between measurements, and predicting new records. Methods like regression models are used to describe and quantify “on average” relationships (e.g., between advertising and sales), to predict new records (e.g., whether a new patient will react positively to a medication), and to forecast future values (e.g., next week’s web traffic).

Readers familiar with earlier editions of this book may have noticed that the book title has changed from Data Mining for Business Intelligence to Data Mining for Business Analytics in this edition. The change reflects the more recent term BA, which overtook the earlier term BI to denote advanced analytics. Today, BI is used to refer to data visualizatio...