12 Nov 2012 Advanced Analytics – a Hot BI Opportunity!
Business Intelligence has matured over the recent years and in the search for ways to secure their competitive advantage companies expect something more nowadays. The standard techniques are becoming a bit mainstream these days. But this is not only the need for more ´trendy´ BI that is creating this demand for new solutions. Companies have been facing a significant increase in the volume of information that needs to be stored as well as a high velocity of data. A new approach is needed to interpret vast amounts of data and to avoid some interesting patterns being hidden behind numbers and simply overlooked. To efficiently manage interactions with their customers, suppliers and partners, companies need a tool to help analyze the data instead of simply reporting on past occurrences. They will surely be interested in taking full advantage of stored data and in avoiding losing opportunities due to information being locked in data silos without a possibility to fully explore its potential. This is what advanced analytics applications may provide.
Benefits
Advanced analytics is said to be one of the trends to shape the future of BI. Having ties with statistics, advanced analytics is often considered complex and although useful, may not bring expected benefits if results cannot be correctly interpreted. Nevertheless more and more companies now value the advantages of using advanced analytics. Benefits vary from the evaluation of customer´s loyalty likelihood through measuring frequency, means or response rates to producing demand forecasts. There is a wide range of potential applications.
Oracle Data Miner
Oracle also cooperates with partners who provide analytics applications built on Oracle technologies (see our blog article on using R, a statistical programming language, as a part of Oracle Advanced Analytics: http://www.clearpeaks.com/blog/data-warehousing/oracle-advanced-analytics).
Apart from Oracle R Enterprise (ORE), Advanced Analytics consists of Oracle Data Mining (ODM). The latest version – Oracle Data Miner 11gR2, which is an extension to Oracle SQL Developer 3.1 – helps explore data, build models and predictions with its graphical user interface. Tables, views and star schemas can be mined, giving a full view of customer´s operations. Additionally, stored models can be applied to new data.
A sample output for cluster analysis is presented below:
One aspect that should be underlined is that these analytics applications operate inside the Oracle Database where all produced calculations are also stored. They can be accessed from OBIEE 11g with https://finasteridehair.com an SQL query. All the output can be displayed using reports and dashboards. The big advantage of storing results in the same database is that the same source of information is used which eliminates potential discrepancies, reduces risks of losing data accuracy and ensures better protection of data. Moreover the entire architecture is simpler.
There are already some competitors – leaders in the market – who focus on this particular field therefore the task would be to offer analytics solutions to the extent customers may need them for their general purposes instead of turning Advanced Analytics into a statistical package; letting the most complex analyses be performed with the special-purpose software. Still, offering some of the analytical features that customers could be interested in to build sales forecasts or to assess likelihood seems to be a smart step. The environment in which enterprises operate is changing rapidly and soon they may find themselves looking for more advanced options to strengthen their competitive advantage. What is now considered a large-scale ambition may become a standard practice in the near future. Surely, it is worth the effort.
With these features, much more information can be retrieved from data that are already stored in a data warehouse. Advantages of analytical features such as time series analysis or built-in statistical functions are enormous. Patterns that are impossible to be identified when looking at numbers and figures can now be explored. Advanced analytical features help identify trends, outstanding values, forecast future levels of sales or demand. Although they were available before in a range of statistical packages, they are now delivered to be used directly in OBIEE 11g, as a part of Oracle Advanced Analytics. Not only does it simplify the entire process but also ensures consistency as there is no need to switch from OBIEE to another package.
Available Data Mining Techniques
A wide range of functionalities is offered, with the below among them:
Summary
Advanced analytics is surely a trend to observe. Those who will understand and adopt it may become leaders in their markets. With Data Miner repository installed in the Oracle Database, Advanced Analytics gives a chance to perform more complex calculations ensuring data consistency and accuracy as the application operates within the same database.
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