Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance. Analytics often favors data visualization to communicate insight.
Firms may commonly apply analytics to business data, to describe, predict, and improve business performance. Specifically, arenas within analytics include enterprise decision management, retail analytics, marketing and web analytics, predictive science, credit risk analysis, and fraud analytics. Since analytics can require extensive computation (See Big Data), the algorithms and software used for analytics harness the most current methods in computer science, statistics, and mathematics.
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