Authors
Sneha Gathani, Madelon Hulsebos, James Gale, Peter J Haas, Çağatay Demiralp
Publication date
2021/9/13
Journal
arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.06160
Description
The fundamental goal of business data analysis is to improve business decisions using data. Business users often make decisions to achieve key performance indicators (KPIs) such as increasing customer retention or sales, or decreasing costs. To discover the relationship between data attributes hypothesized to be drivers and those corresponding to KPIs of interest, business users currently need to perform lengthy exploratory analyses. This involves considering multitudes of combinations and scenarios and performing slicing, dicing, and transformations on the data accordingly, e.g., analyzing customer retention across quarters of the year or suggesting optimal media channels across strata of customers. However, the increasing complexity of datasets combined with the cognitive limitations of humans makes it challenging to carry over multiple hypotheses, even for simple datasets. Therefore mentally performing such analyses is hard. Existing commercial tools either provide partial solutions or fail to cater to business users altogether. Here we argue for four functionalities to enable business users to interactively learn and reason about the relationships between sets of data attributes thereby facilitating data-driven decision making. We implement these functionalities in SystemD, an interactive visual data analysis system enabling business users to experiment with the data by asking what-if questions. We evaluate the system through three business use cases: marketing mix modeling, customer retention analysis, and deal closing analysis, and report on feedback from multiple business users. Users find the SystemD functionalities highly useful …
Total citations
202220232024333
Scholar articles
S Gathani, M Hulsebos, J Gale, PJ Haas, Ç Demiralp - arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.06160, 2021