Business Analytics

Business Analytics 5E is designed to introduce the concept of business analytics to under-
graduate and graduate students. This edition builds upon what was one of the first collec-
tions of materials that are essential to the growing field of business analytics. In Chapter 1, we
present an overview of business analytics and our approach to the material in this textbook.
In simple terms, business analytics helps business professionals make better decisions based
on data. We discuss exploring, wrangling, summarizing, visualizing, and understanding data
in Chapters 2 through 5. In Chapter 6, we introduce additional models to describe data and
the relationships among variables. Chapters 7 through 11 introduce methods for both gain-
ing insights from historical data and predicting possible future outcomes.  Chapter 12 covers
the use of spreadsheets for examining data and building decision models. In Chapter 13, we
demonstrate how to explicitly introduce uncertainty into spreadsheet models through the use
of Monte Carlo simulation. In Chapters 14 through 16, we discuss optimization models to
help decision makers choose the best decision based on the available data. Chapter 17 is an
overview of decision analysis approaches for incorporating a decision maker’s views about
risk into decision making. In Appendix A we present optional material for students who need
to learn the basics of using Microsoft Excel. The use of databases and manipulating data in
Microsoft Access is discussed in Appendix B. Appendixes in many chapters illustrate the
use of additional software tools such as Tableau, R, and Orange to apply analytics methods.