Business analytics is a fast growing field and there are many
tools available in the market to serve the needs of organizations. The range of
analytical software goes from relatively simple statistical tools in
spreadsheets (ex-MS Excel) to statistical software packages (ex-KXEN,
Statistica) to sophisticated business intelligence suites (ex-SAS, Oracle, SAP,
IBM among the big players). Open source tools like R and Weka are also gaining
popularity. Besides these, companies develop in-house tools designed for
specific purposes.
Commercial
software
MS Excel: Almost every business
user has access to MS Office suite and Excel. Excel is an excellent reporting
and dash boarding tool. For most business projects, even if you run the heavy
statistical analysis on different software but you will still end up using Excel
for the reporting and presentation of results. While most people are aware of
its excellent reporting and graphing abilities, excel can be a powerful
analytic tool in the hands of an experienced user. Latest versions of Excel can
handle tables with up to 1 million rows making it a powerful yet versatile
tool.
SAS: SAS is the 5000 pound
gorilla of the analytics world and claims to be the largest independent vendor
in the business intelligence market. It is the most commonly used software in
the Indian analytics market despite its monopolistic pricing. SAS software has
wide ranging capabilities from data management to advanced analytics.
SPSS Modeler
(Clementine): SPSS Modeler is a data mining software tool by SPSS Inc., an IBM
company. It was originally named SPSS Clementine. This tool has an intuitive
GUI and its point-and-click modelling capabilities are very comprehensive.
Statistica: is a statistics and analytics software package developed by
StatSoft. It provides data analysis, data management, data mining, and data
visualization procedures. Statistica supports a wide variety of analytic
techniques and is capable of meeting most needs of the business users. The GUI
is not the most user-friendly and it may take a little more time to learn than
some tools but it is a competitively priced product that is value for money.
Salford
systems: provides a host of predictive analytics and data mining tools
for businesses. The company specialises in classification and regression tree
algorithms. Its MARS algorithm was originally developed by world-renowned
Stanford statistician and physicist, Jerome Friedman. The software is easy to
use and learn.
KXEN: is one of the few
companies that is driving automated analytics. Their products, largely based on
algorithms developed by the Russian mathematician Vladimir Vapnik, are easy to
use, fast and can work with large amounts of data. Some users may not like the
fact that KXEN works like a ‘black box’ and in most cases, it is difficult to
understand and explain the results.
Angoss: Like Salford systems,
Angoss has developed its products around classification and regression decision
tree algorithms. The advantage of this is that the tools are easy to learn and
use, and the results easy to understand and explain. The GUI is very user friendly, a lot of features have been added over the years to make this a powerful
tool.
MATLAB: is a statistical
computing software developed by MathWorks, MATLAB allows matrix manipulations,
plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms and creation of
user interfaces. There are many add-on toolboxes that extend MATLAB to specific
areas of functionality, such as statistics, finance, image processing,
bioinformatics, etc. Matlab is not a free software.
Open Source
Software
R: R is a programming
language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R
language is an open source tool and is widely used by the academia. For
business users, the programming language does represent a hurdle. However,
there are many GUIs available that can sit on R and enhance its
user-friendliness.
Weka: Weka (Waikato Environment
for Knowledge Analysis) is a popular suite of machine learning software,
developed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Weka, along with R, is
amongst the most popular open source software used by the business community. The
software is written in the Java language and contains a GUI for interacting
with data files and producing visual results and graphs.
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