DATA ANALYTICS

 WHAT IS BUSINESS ANALYTICS?

Business analytics is the use of math and statistics to collect, analyze, and interpret data to make better
business decisions.
There are four key types of business analytics: descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and prescriptive.
Descriptive analytics is the interpretation of historical data to identify trends and patterns, while
predictive analytics centers on taking that information and using it to forecast future outcomes.
Diagnostic analytics can be used to identify the root cause of a problem. In the case of prescriptive
analytics, testing and other techniques are employed to determine which outcome will yield the best
result in a given scenario.

 Business Analytics vs. Data Science

It’s important to highlight the difference between business analytics and data science. While both
processes use big data to solve business problems they’re separate fields.
The main goal of business analytics is to extract meaningful insights from data to guide organizational
decisions, while data science is focused on turning raw data into meaningful conclusions through
using algorithms and statistical models. Business analysts participate in tasks such as budgeting,
forecasting, and product development, while data scientists focus on data wrangling, programming,
and statistical modeling.

Now, data science, the discipline of making data useful, is an umbrella term that encompasses three
disciplines: machine learning, statistics, and analytics. These are separated by how many decisions
you know you want to make before you begin with them. If you want to make a few important
decisions under uncertainty, that is statistics. If you want to automate, in other words, make many,
many, many decisions under uncertainty, that is machine learning and AI.
  Machine Learning VS Statistics VS Analytics

The excellence of statistics is rigor. Statisticians are essentially philosophers, epistemologists. They
are very, very careful about protecting decision-makers from coming to the wrong conclusion. If that
care and rigor is what you are passionate about, I would recommend statistics.
Performance is the excellence of the machine learning and AI engineer. You know that's the one for
you if someone says to you, "I bet that you couldn't build an automation system that performs this task
with 99.99999 percent accuracy," and your response to that is, "Watch me."
How about analytics? The excellence of an analyst is speed. How quickly can you surf through vast
amounts of data to explore it and discover the gems, the beautiful potential insights that are worth
knowing about and bringing to your decision-makers, working on a lot of different things, looking at a
lot of different data sources, and thinking through vast amounts of information, while promising not to
snooze past the important potential insights. No one has looked at it before. Go find something
interesting If that's you, then analytics is probably the best fit for you.

The six steps of the data analysis process that you have been learning in this program are: ask, prepare,
process, analyze, share, and act. These six steps apply to any data analysis.

The six phases of data analysis

The data analysis process helps analysts break down business problems into a series of manageable
tasks:
1. In the ask phase (Ask: business challenge, objective, or question), you’ll work to understand the
challenge to be solved or the question to be answered. It will likely be assigned to you by
stakeholders. As this is the ask phase, you’ll ask many questions to help you along the way.
2. Next, in the prepare phase (Prepare: data generation, collection, storage, and data
management), you’ll find and collect the data you'll need to answer your questions. You’ll
identify data sources, gather data, and verify that it is accurate and useful for answering your
questions.
3. The process phase (Process: data cleaning and data integrity) is when you will clean and
organize your data. Tasks you perform here include removing any inconsistencies; filling in
missing values; and, in many cases, changing the data to a format that's easier to work with.
Essentially, you’re ensuring the data is ready before you begin analysis.
4. The analyze phase (Analyze: data exploration, visualization, and analysis) is when you do the
necessary data analysis to uncover answers and solutions. Depending on the situation and the
data, this could involve tasks such as calculating averages or counting items in categories so
you can examine trends and patterns.
5. Next comes the share phase (Share: communicating and interpreting results), when you
present your findings to decision-makers through a report, presentation, or data
visualizations. As part of the share phase, you decide which medium you want to use to share
your findings and select the data to include. Tools for presenting data visually include charts
made in Google Sheets, Tableau, and R.
6. Last is the act phase (Act: putting insights to work to solve the problem), in which you and others in
the company put the data insights into action. This could mean implementing a new business
strategy, making changes to a website, or any other action that solves the initial problem.
  EMC's data analysis process
EMC Corporation's data analytics process is cyclical with six steps:

1. Discovery

2. Pre-processing data

3. Model planning

4. Model building

5. Communicate results

6. Operationalize

It is a little different from the data analysis process on which this program is based on, but it
has some core ideas in common: the first phase is interested in discovering and asking
questions; data has to be prepared before it can be analyzed and used; and then findings
should be shared and acted on.

 SAS's iterative process

An iterative data analysis process was created by a company called SAS, a leading data
analytics solutions provider. It can be used to produce repeatable, reliable, and predictive
results:

1. Ask

2. Prepare

3. Explore

4. Model

5. Implement

6. Act

7. Evaluate

The SAS model emphasizes the cyclical nature of their model by visualizing it as an infinity
symbol. Its process has seven steps, many of which mirror the other models, like ask, prepare,
model, and act. But this process is also a little different; it includes a step after the act phase
designed to help analysts evaluate their solutions and potentially return to the ask phase
again.
  Project-based data analytics process
A project-based data analytics process has five simple steps:

1. Identifying the problem

2. Designing data requirements

3. Pre-processing data

4. Performing data analysis

5. Visualizing data

This data analytics project process was developed by Vignesh Prajapati. It doesn’t include the
sixth phase, or the act phase. However, it still covers a lot of the same steps described. It
begins with identifying the problem, preparing and processing data before analysis, and ends
with data visualization.

 Big data analytics process

Authors Thomas Erl, Wajid Khattak, and Paul Buhler proposed a big data analytics process in
their book, Big Data Fundamentals: Concepts, Drivers & Techniques. Their process suggests
phases divided into nine steps:
1. Business case evaluation
2. Data identification
3. Data acquisition and filtering
4. Data extraction
5. Data validation and cleaning
6. Data aggregation and representation
7. Data analysis
8. Data visualization
9. Utilization of analysis results
This process appears to have three or four more steps than the previous models. But in reality,
they have just broken down what has been referred to as prepare and process into smaller
steps. It emphasizes the individual tasks required for gathering, preparing, and cleaning data
before the analysis phase.
  Data ecosystems

Data ecosystems are made up of various elements that interact with one another in order to
produce, manage, store, organize, analyze, and share data. These elements include hardware
and software tools, and the people who use them. The cloud is a place to keep data online,
rather than on a computer hard drive. So instead of storing data somewhere inside your
organization's network, that data is accessed over the internet. So the cloud is just a term we
use to describe the virtual location. The cloud plays a big part in the data ecosystem, and as a
data analyst, it's your job to harness the power of that data ecosystem, find the right
information, and provide the team with analysis that helps them make smart decisions.

 Data scientists VS data analysts

Data science is defined as creating new ways of modeling and understanding the unknown by
using raw data. Data scientists create new questions using data, while analysts find answers to
existing questions by creating insights from data sources.
Data analysis is the collection, transformation, and organization of data in order to draw
conclusions, make predictions, and drive informed decision-making. Data analytics in the
simplest terms is the science of data. It's a very broad concept that encompasses everything
from the job of managing and using data to the tools and methods that data workers use each
and every day.

 How data informs better decisions

The first step in data-driven decision-making is figuring out the business need. Usually, this is
a problem that needs to be solved. Whatever the problem is, once it's defined, a data analyst
finds data, analyzes it and uses it to uncover trends, patterns and relationships. Sometimes the
data-driven strategy will build on what's worked in the past. Other times, it can guide a
business to branch out in a whole new direction. By ensuring that data is built into every
business strategy, data analysts play a critical role in their companies' success, but it's
important to note that no matter how valuable data-driven decision-making is, data alone will
never be as powerful as data combined with human experience, observation, and sometimes
even intuition. To get the most out of data-driven decision-making, it's important to include
insights from people who are familiar with the business problem. These people are called
subject matter experts, and they have the ability to look at the results of data analysis and
identify any inconsistencies, make sense of gray areas, and eventually validate choices being
made. Organizations that work this way put data at the heart of every business strategy, but
also benefit from the insights of their people.
  Analytical Thinking

The five key aspects to analytical thinking. They are visualization, strategy, problem-
orientation, correlation, and finally, big-picture and detail-oriented thinking.
 Visualization is the graphical representation of information. Some examples include
graphs, maps, or other design elements. Visuals can help data analysts understand and
explain information more effectively.
 Strategic: With so much data available, having a strategic mindset is key to staying
focused and on track. Strategizing helps data analysts see what they want to achieve
with the data and how they can get there. Strategy also helps improve the quality and
usefulness of the data we collect. By strategizing, we know all our data is valuable
and can help us accomplish our goals.
 Problem-oriented: Data analysts use a problem- oriented approach in order to
identify, describe, and solve problems.
 Correlation: Being able to identify a correlation between two or more pieces of data.
A correlation is like a relationship. Correlation does not equal causation. In other
words, just because two pieces of data are both trending in the same direction, that
doesn't necessarily mean they are all related.
 Big-picture thinking: This means being able to see the big picture as well as the
details. It helps you zoom out and see possibilities and opportunities. This leads to
exciting new ideas or innovations. There are all kinds of problems in the business
world that can benefit from employees who have both a big-picture and a detail-
oriented way of thinking.
DATA AND DECISION

Data-inspired decision-making explores different data sources to find

out what they have in common.
An algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed for a specific
task.