With the goal of improving the text, this edition marks a major reorganization of the text to reflect the focus on business analytics. This edition is now organized around three major types of business analytics (i.e., descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive). The new edition has many timely additions, and the dated content has been deleted. The following major specific changes have been made:
New Organization- The book recognizes three types of analytics: descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive, a classification promoted by INFORMS. Chapter 1 introduces BI and analytics with an application focus in many industries. This Chapter also includes an overview of the analytics ecosystem to help the user explore all the different ways one can participate and grow in the analytics environment. It is followed by an overview of statistics, importance of data, and descriptive analytics/visualization in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 covers data warehousing and data foundations including updated content, specifically data lakes. Chapter 4 covers predictive analytics. Chapter 5 extends the application of analytics to text, Web, and social media. Chapter 6 covers Prescriptive Analytics, specifically linear programming and simulation. It is totally new content for this book. Chapter 7 introduces Big Data tools and platforms. The book concludes with Chapter 8, emerging trends and topics in business analytics including location analytics, Internet of Things, cloud-based analytics, and privacy/ethical considerations in analytics. The discussion of analytics ecosystem recognizes prescriptive analytics as well.