Business Intelligence: Data Mining and Optimization for Decision Making

by Carlo Vercellis

Business intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better business decisions. The term implies having a comprehensive knowledge of all factors that affect a business, such as customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment, and internal operations, therefore enabling optimal decisions to be made. Business Intelligence provides readers with an introduction and practical guide to the mathematical models and analysis methodologies vital to business intelligence. This This book is aimed at postgraduate students following data analysis and data mining courses. Researchers looking for a systematic and broad coverage of topics in operations research and mathematical models for decision-making will find this an invaluable guide.

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Giri Namasivayam]

This book describes both an architectural framework and analytic lifecycle for decision support systems, including an overview of decision making processes, data warehousing, and multidimensional analysis. It also provides detailed descriptions (including the mathematical and algorithmic techniques) of the different categories of supervised vs. unsupervised learning methods used in data analytic applications. For those who approach this topic from the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing perspective, the book is very useful in understanding the higher level functions that can be applied to the data beyond reporting and charting.

[Bernd]

In a sea of books riding the popularity of the term "Business Intelligence" this book stands out with its rebalancing the focus on improving business results. It does not get lost in tool worship, instead it ties methods to desired business goals.