Chapter 11 - Business Analytics and Predictive Modeling Overview - Review Questions

Define business analytics

Business analytics is a set of solution including data mining, predictive analytics, and applied statistics used for development of models and simulation to assist industry business processes.

Which of the following statement is not true? A. Source-to-source target mapping is an integral component of data warehouse development. B. Data warehousing provides access to the information that facilitates business performance management. C. Typically, the data in a data warehouse or data mart originate from a variety of internal and external sources and systems, and they exist in a variety of sometimes incompatible formats. D. Tactical planning facilitates completion of the activities identified in operational planning.

D. Tactical planning facilitates completion of the activities identified in operational planning.

Describe how to process data for business intelligence.

Data can be processed through an integrative and iterative process, ongoing processes such as ETL for strategic, tactical, and operational business intelligence.

Explain how business intelligence (BI) and predictive modeling impact the development of databases.

Databases designed for use in data warehouse and data marts focus on facilitating analysis. Managers and analysts use these databases to gain an understanding of business and predictive modeling. Each analytic query can involve many records, in some cases millions, and the amount of data under analysis is generally quite large. The underlying data must support the analytics and predictive needs; hence as time progresses, databases are developed to support the demands of BI and predictive modeling.

True or False: Full extraction is more complex to perform than incremental extraction.

False.

True or False: Traditional data warehouses were typically updated on a weekly basis.

False.

How does data warehousing support business performance management (BPM)?

Owing to the two elements of data warehousing, the internal and external software and the resulting database, it can support BPM by enhancing an organization's ability to access and analyze data.

List five steps in building a predictive model.

Retrieve and organize the data; Understand the data; Split the data and build a model; Evaluate the model's performance, and; Iterate and choose a model.

Define and contracts concepts of strategic, tactical, and operational business intelligence.

Strategic, tactical, and operational are the various approaches to business intelligence (BI) to achieve an organization's objectives. Strategic BI is the approach used by executives and senior managers with an aim to monitor key performance indicators (KPI). Whereas tactical BI is used by managers and analysts to measure KPI periodically, while operational BI is used by managers by managers and supervisors to measure daily or real-time information about transactions or processes.

Briefly describe the three disciplines of analytics

The three disciplines are descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive. Descriptive analytics is used for depiction of a past or current state; predictive analytics are useful for prediction of the future based on historical trend, whereas, prescriptive analytics is chosen by managers for decision-making.

Describe how the vocabulary of data warehousing and business intelligence is changing.

The vocabulary and terminology used in data warehousing and business intelligence has changed with time by creation of new terminology and repurposing of the old for marketing of the various hardware and software solutions.