Book: Reactive Business Intelligence

reactivebusinessintelligence.com/

With its combination of data mining, modelling and visualization ( using the authors Grapheur software) this book would be of interest to many analytic professionals.

From Introduction

It is obvious, you can see it! Think about how many times you intuitively associate clarity and real understanding with vision. The word intelligence itself derives from the Latin verb intelligere (coming from intus legere, "reading into something," a close cousin of "insight"), again related to reading and seeing. Humans are innately visual creatures and a big portion of our brain is devoted to processing visual information. Our ancestors needed to be very fast to identify predators in the jungle and to react accordingly. They did not survive and transmit genes if they did not. We need to be very fast to transform huge amounts of information into insight, knowledge, engineering designs, choices, decisions.

We decided to unite in this book aspects related to modeling and aspects related to visualizing data and models. We are concerned with explanations of our world which can be used, used to predict, used to build tools. This means measuring objects and events, mining and analyzing massive amounts of data, and discovering interesting relationships emerging from the data. Visual analytics is a term used to denote analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. The effort is surely related to data mining, the process of automatically extracting interesting patterns from massive amounts of data.

We prefer the term Reactive Business Intelligence (RBI) to underline its practical orientation and the fast reaction implied by two basic learning components, one connecting the user to the software, a second one internal to the software, through automated and intelligent self-tuning methods. A connection between visualization and problem-solving strategies is also at the heart of RBI: the decision maker can be, and should be, in an interactive loop, rapidly reacting to first results and visualizations to direct the subsequent efforts to suit his needs and preferences.