Analyzing Analytics

Many organizations today are faced with the challenge of processing and distilling information from huge and growing collections of data. Such organizations are increasingly deploying sophisticated mathematical algorithms to model the behavior of their business processes to discover correlations in the data, to predict trends and ultimately drive decisions to optimize their operations. These techniques, are known collectively as analytics, and draw upon multiple disciplines, including statistics, quantitative analysis, data mining, and machine learning. In this survey paper, we identify some of the key techniques employed in analytics both to serve as an introduction for the non-specialist and to explore the opportunity for greater optimizations for parallelization an