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The simplest definition of 'Analytics' is "the science of analysis". Analytics is a field of study / profession that has applications in any field (business / social / poiltical / home) where data is available.
A more common application of 'Analytics' is the study of business data using statistical analysis in order to discover and understand historical patterns with an eye to predicting and improving business performance in the future. Some people use the term "Analytics" to denote the use of mathematics in business. This field includes the use of Operations Research, Statistics and Probability.
Analytics closely resembles statistical analysis and data mining, but tends to be based on physics modeling involving extensive computation. Some fields within the area of analytics are enterprise decision management, marketing analytics, predictive science, strategy science, credit risk analysis and fraud analytics.

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Portfolio analysis

See also

Portfolio analysis

A common application of business analytics is portfolio analysis. In this, a bank or lending agency has a collection of accounts of varying value and risk. The accounts may differ by the social status (wealthy, middle-class, poor, etc.) of the holder, the geographical location, its net value, and many other factors. The lender must balance the return on the loan with the risk of default for each loan. The question is then how to evaluate the portfolio as a whole.
For instance, the least risk loan may be to the very wealthy. However, there are a very limited number of wealthy people. On the other hand there are many poor that can be lent to, but at greater risk. Some balance must be struck that maximizes return and minimizes risk.
The analytics solution may combine time series analysis, with many other issues in order to make decisions on when to lend money to these different borrower segments, or decisions on the interest rate charged to members of a portfolio segment to cover any losses among members in that segment.

See also

★ Predictive analytics

★ Data mining

★ Machine learning

★ List of software engineering topics

★ Statistics

★ OLAP

★ Business intelligence

★ Web analytics

★ Business analytics

★ Google Analytics