Summary

Business analytics refers to different approaches for modelling and arriving at assessing and predicting risk, predicting market preferences, project feasibility, customer segmentation, inherent and underlying dimensions in consumer preferences, factors leading to probability of purchase, preferred segments in the financial and credit card industry, and the probability of attrition in large organisations.

The range of modelling and other analytical approaches which constitute business analytical applications in Indian industry today include: Determining which attributes in a product are considered significant by the market and which are found to be significantly satisfactory-Gap Analysis. Analytical modelling by factor and cluster analysis. Analytical modelling by logistics regression and discriminant analysis. Segmentation of the primary target market by heuristic modelling, such as RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis. Segmentation of the target market based on large databases using Decision Tree approaches such as CHAID (Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detection) and other classification and regression trees. Determining linkages between unobserved constructs such as customer satisfaction and factors leading to it, using structural equation modelling (SEM). Determining relative preferences in consumer perceptions by conjoint analysis.

The author discusses these analytical approaches in a classroom teaching format. The book first discusses all important concepts, before discussing case studies that emulate real-life managerial situations.

This textbook is designed to serve the needs of management students for a course in business analytics.