Big Data, Big Analytics: Emerging Business Intelligence and Analytic Trends for Today's Businesses

Chapter 5

Business Analytics

The future is here, and now, at your disposal to capitalize on. Today, we are at an inflection point at which we have the intellectual and computational power to fully capitalize on and ride a wave to cost effective top-line revenue growth powered by Big Data analytics. Will you take some plunges and wipe out along the way? Absolutely! But the sooner you start learning, the sooner you’ll get to ride that perfect wave, which will create a friction-free environment for your business to reap the huge financial rewards awaiting those who master the perfect wave.

Predictive analytics in the past has been largely constrained so much so that many of the constraints became well-entrenched assumptions that were the shackles that constrained the potential results. Even so, those who have used predictive analytics have realized significant, quantifiable business value. In this new age of Big Data analytics, the assumptions have been cast aside as Big Data is disrupting the well-known but not fully realized discipline of predictive analytics.

The term predictive analytics was coined to distinguish statistics from more advanced type of calculations that are used to predict likelihoods of future outcomes. Certain industries, such as banks, insurance companies, and digital advertising, have fully embraced predictive analytics but most other businesses are still at very early stages of adoption. While there is a full spectrum of analytics for Big Data analytics the ...