KDnuggets Home » Polls » What do you call analyzing data? (Sep 2011)

What do you call analyzing data?


 
  
What term do you currently prefer for describing the activity of analyzing data and finding useful patterns: [172 votes]
Data Mining (94)  54.7%
Predictive Analytics (25)  14.5%
Statistics (15)  8.7%
Business Analytics (12)  7.0%
Knowledge Discovery (9)  5.2%
Business Intelligence (5)  2.9%
Data Science (4)  2.3%
Other (8)  2%

We note that "Data Mining" is still most popular term among KDnuggets readers, followed by "Predictive Analytics", with "Data science" the least popular. This suggests that "Data Science" term caught more among press than among people who actually do data analysis.

The respondents employer type was

  • Industry/Self-employed , 58.7%
  • Academia/Student , 32.6%
  • Government or Non-profit , 5.8%
  • Other , 2.9%

Next, we broke down most popular terms by employer type (group non-Industry into one mainly academic group). For each name, industry "Bias" is the ratio of industry/non-industry respondents who chose this term to the overall industry/non-industry ratio of 1.42.

Thus we see that Predictive Analytics has Industry bias of 5.16 - it is used 5 times frequently by industry people than by non-industry ones.

We note that data mining is the more popular name among both industry and academia. However, 2nd most popular name in industry is Predictive Analytics, while in academia it is Statistics.

In the following table, the Academia and Industry columns width represent the bias towards the term in Academia/Industry respectively, and bar height represents the popularity of the term.

Term (Industry Bias)AcademiaIndustry
Predictive Analytics (5.16)
Business Analytics (2.11)
Data Mining (0.87)
Statistics (0.26)
Knowledge Discovery (0.20)

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