Global Business Analytics Models: Concepts and Applications in Predictive, Healthcare, Supply Chain, and Finance Analytics

3. Business Analytics Models

3.1 Quantitative Tools for Business Analytics

As summarized in Table 2.2 in the preceding chapter, business analytics often uses various quantitative tools to transform big data into insightful contexts useful for making wise business decisions. In a broad sense, these quantitative tools can be broken down into statistics, data mining, operations research (OR), and simulation. In particular, statistics can be useful for collecting, manipulating, and interpreting big data as part of descriptive analytics. It also can be useful for identifying and validating a causal relationship between two events as part of diagnostics analytics, while helping to predict future events as part of predictive analytics. Data mining ...