Identifying a problem - Answers Who are our customers? How frequently do they shop at our
location?
What products do they buy from us? What is their share of wallet for our brand?
Who is our most loyal customer? Who is our most valuable customer?
How should we treat our most valuable customer?
How do we learn more about our customers?
What strategy should we implement to bring customers to our door more frequently?
What should be the promotion strategy to get more attention from our customers?
Principles of Problem Framing - Answers Tell an interesting and complete story
Find an appropriate solution framework
Routinize the procedure
Analytics - Answers -is the process of developing actionable decisions or recommendations for actions
based on insights generated from historical data
-represents the combination of computer technology, management science techniques, and statistics
to solve real problems.
Primary Data - Answers Survey, Interviews (marketing firm's telephone interviews), Used a lot in
marketing research
Secondary Data - Answers Firm's proprietary database, Internet data (crawlers) [scarpy,
beautifulsoup], Stock/capital market data [compustat, CRSP] Accounting disclosure data [ from 10K,
10Q]
Simulated Data - Answers Data based on assumption and simulation Used a lot in scheduling, routing
and queuing
Data Extraction - Answers Extract data from primary/secondary source
Data Transformation - Answers Transform / clean data into proper format or structure for the
purpose of querying & analysis
Data Load - Answers Load data into final target database, more specifically an operational data store,
data mart or data warehouse
ETL - Answers is time consuming and sometimes done in parallel. Several computation tools are used
to develop robust ETL systems.
Descriptive Analytics - Answers This is a preliminary stage of data processing that creates a summary
of historical data to yield useful information and possibly prepare the data for further analysis.
Questions: (1) What happened? (2) What is happening?
Methods: (1) Standard reporting (2) Dashboards (3) Visual analytics
Outcome: Well defined business problems and opportunities
Diagnostic/Explanatory Analytics - Answers this is about looking into the past and determining why a
certain thing happened. This type of analytics usually revolves around working on a dashboard.
Question: (1) Why did it happen? (2) How did it happen?
Methods - Answers Inferential Statistics, Visual analytics
Outcome - Answers Discover/Understand causal relationships of an outcome
Predictive Analytics - Answers Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms and
machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data.
The goal is to go beyond knowing what has happened to providing a best assessment of what will
happen in the future.
Question: (1) What will happen next? (2) Why will it happen next?
Methods: (1) Data mining (2) Text mining (3) Forecasting
Outcome: Accurate projections of future outcomes and events
Prescriptive Analytics - Answers Prescriptive analytics answers the question of what to do by providing
information on optimal decisions based on the predicted future scenarios. The key to prescriptive
analytics is being able to use big data, contextual data and lots of computing power to produce
answers in real time.
Question: (1) What should be done about it? (2) Why should you do it?
Methods: (1) Optimization (2) Simulation (3) Expert systems
Outcome: Best possible business decision and outcome
Data visualization - Answers is the graphical representation of information and data
, -charts, graphs, and maps provide access to see and understand trends, outliers, and
patterns in data
Basic Principles of Visualization- - Answers (Edward Tufte)
The chart should tell a story The chart should have graphical integrity The chart should
minimize graphical complexity
Data Visualization Principle - Answers -The depictions should enable meaningful comparison
-The chart should yield insight beyond the text
-The chart should have graphical integrity. It should not "lie" or mislead readers. Tufte's
"Lie Factor":
Story Telling - Answers Stories have been told for millennia
• To entertain
• The moral of the story
Analytics & Story Telling - Answers science & data μ, σ 2 , χ 2 , Σ, etc, etc...
For content: - Answers create and weave threads to form the fabric of the story • Compelling
narrative
Beginning - Answers Context: set the scene
Middle - Answers Execute analysis & report results
End - Answers Review what was intended, interpret results - Conclusions naturally flow
Problem - Answers More negative, Backwards looking, Needs to be fixed, Bad immediate, Engage
solution mode
Opportunity - Answers More positive, Forwards looking, Could be worth doing, Good, possibility,
Engage evaluation mode
Visualization - Answers is primarily descriptive
Story telling - Answers weaves the narrative around visuals to bring out the explanation ("why")
Qualitative - Answers -Is descriptive and conceptual and cannot be measured
Quantitative - Answers -Can be counted, measured, and expressed using numbers
Numerical - Answers -Interval, ratio
Categorical - Answers -Nominal, Ordinal
Nominal - Answers -In nominal measurement the numerical values just "name" the attribute uniquely
Categorical:Ordinal - Answers -Categorical data can be on an ordinal scale. Numbers are used to
indicate rank or order
Numerical: Interval - Answers Also known as "Scale", "Quantitative" or "Parametric" data
-Distances between consecutive integers are equal
Numerical: Ratio - Answers Ratio is very similar to the interval scale, with the difference that it has a
true zero point.
This scale is commonly used for values that are measured in numbers, such as length,
height, weight, or monetary values like cost and revenue.
Statistics - Answers is the science concerned with developing and studying methods for collecting,
analyzing, interpreting and presenting empirical data to assist in making effective decisions.
Three principles of describing data - Answers -Center, Spread and Shape
Inferential statistics (study sample data) - Answers Estimate uncertainty (using probability) some
member of the data to infer about population data
Population: - Answers -the whole
-a collection of persons, objects, or items under study
Census: - Answers -gathering data from the entire population
Sample: - Answers - a portion of the whole/population a subset of the population; must be large
enough to
represent the whole
Measures of central tendency - Answers -yield information about the center, or middle part, of a
group of numbers.
-Mean Median Mode Percentiles Quartiles
Mean - Answers Is the average of a group of numbers
Median - Answers Middle value in an ordered array of numbers
Mode: - Answers The most frequently occurring value in a data set
Measures of variability - Answers describe the spread or the dispersion of a set of data.
Common Measures of Variability: - Answers Range Interquartile Range Mean Absolute Deviation
Variance Standard Deviation