About This Special Issue
Organizations today have access to enormous data sets, and sophisticated business analytical tools are needed to harness the tremendous potential of these data to improve day-to-day decision making. Applications of business analytics extend to nearly all managerial functions in an organization. Using microlevel data, mathematical models can become more realistic, be validated more easily, and match more closely true behavioral phenomena. Through business analytics, historical data can be used to discover relationships among important elements in an organization’s environment, make more formal statistical inferences regarding the structure or strength of these relationships, and improve actions taken by the organization. Because these relationships are often not static, the entire cycle of identification, estimation, prediction, and decision making is repeated frequently and on an ongoing basis, leading to real-time and highly targeted data-driven decisions. To encourage further developments in this rapidly growing area of interdisciplinary research, Science Publishing Group will publish a special issue dedicated to business analytics. In this special issue, we seek submissions concerning all aspects of business analytics and management.