Essentials of Business Analytics: An Introduction to the Methodology and its Applications

This comprehensive edited volume is the first of its kind, designed to serve as a textbook for long-duration business analytics programs. It can also be used as a guide to the field by practitioners. The book has contributions from experts in top universities and industry. The editors have taken extreme care to ensure continuity across the chapters. The material is organized into three parts: A) Tools, B) Models and C) Applications. In Part A, the tools used by business analysts are described in detail. In Part B, these tools are applied to construct models used to solve business problems. Part C contains detailed applications in various functional areas of business and several case studies. Supporting material can be found in the appendices that develop the pre-requisites for the main text. Every chapter has a business orientation. Typically, each chapter begins with the description of business problems that are transformed into data questions; and methodology is developed to solve these questions. Data analysis is conducted using widely used software, the output and results are clearly explained at each stage of development. These are finally transformed into a business solution. The companion website provides examples, data sets and sample code for each chapter.