Advanced and Predictive Analysis

Advanced and Predictive Analysis gives power business users and information analysts full investigative power into any corner of the data warehouse to find out the details behind specific performance outcomes. Such requirements usually exceed the limits of OLAP Analysis. MicroStrategy has created an environment that lets users move seamlessly from basic OLAP to advanced statistical analysis and full data mining capabilities. Our BI technology was designed specifically to deliver the common functionality of statistical and data mining tools in a way that is familiar and consistent with everyday business intelligence usage.

Our platform supports advanced and predictive analysis capabilities, enabling users for the first time to perform analyses such as hypothesis testing, churn prediction and customer scoring models within a single unified web interface. With built-in support for over 400 Statistical, Mathematical and Financial functions, MicroStrategy lets users create reporting applications that combine ease-of-use with unparalleled backend sophistication.

MicroStrategy Platform Features that Support Advanced & Predictive Analysis:

Self Service Reporting and Guided Analysis

Users can create customized reports by selecting data objects to display and defining qualifications as report filtering criteria. MicroStrategy offers several guided approaches to creating brand new reports - from step by step user prompts for selecting and qualifying business attributes and metrics to wizards that incorporate existing report templates and filters.

Parameter-driven Reporting Functionality

Users can customize the content and layout of any given report with a range of variations defined by certain factors or parameters. MicroStrategy provides the richest range of parameterization available, allowing one report design to manifest into more variations than with any other BI technology. Even novice users can create sophisticated custom reports at any time by selecting metrics and business criteria at run-time.

Drill Anywhere Capabilities

MicroStrategy provides a business view of enterprise data. Users do not need to understand databases, table structures, or query languages -- just how to point and click. MicroStrategy's workflow guides help users "drill" into detail as represented by their business model, not their database model. With drill anywhere capabilities, users can view summary- to detail-level data, with access to the entire breadth and depth of data contained in a database.

Set Analysis and Data Segmentation

Users can leverage the set analytics that MicroStrategy provides to perform easy segmentation of data. They can manipulate and combine user-defined sets of data to obtain a refined data set for further analysis. Set analysis is a core part of the MicroStrategy platform and can be applied against the entire data store. Sets can be personalized per user, shared within a department, combined using logical operators and reused across multiple reports.

User-defined Data Groupings

A data warehouse is organized in a structure that reflects the business model of an enterprise, but this structure does not always reflect the business needs of individual departments, teams and decision makers. With unique features like Custom Groups and Consolidations, the MicroStrategy platform helps business users combine the relevant data into a single report. Custom Groups and Consolidations allow MicroStrategy users to define reports on a row-by-row basis, refining the business model to meet department or individual needs without impacting the structure of the enterprise data model.

Analytical Treatment of the Data

MicroStrategy provides the broadest and deepest set of analytical functions available in any business intelligence platform. These range from simple mathematical functions, such as running totals to advanced statistical computations such as f-tests. The analytical packages that are available include statistical, financial, and math function libraries. This enables the business to answer all its analytical questions using a single platform.

Custom Function Plug-ins

Many organizations have also developed custom algorithms for calculating scores and other statistical models. These constitute valuable intellectual property and must be reused in reporting applications. Using a custom function plug-in wizard, MicroStrategy users can input custom functions to be used in report creation. Once these have been defined, they are automatically made available to all users to define metrics and measures.

Integrating Data Mining with Business Intelligence

Predictive Analysis, or Data Mining, is the process of examining large amounts of data in search of hidden patterns and predictive information that allows organizations to make proactive decisions that ultimately improve efficiency and effectiveness. MicroStrategy Data Mining Services improves upon basic data mining functionality by integrating it with standard features of our BI platform -- robust security, flexible information distribution and collaboration, easy self-service analysis and scalability to large user populations and data volumes. Our BI platform also supports Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), an XML standard that enables data mining models to integrate with other applications. This integration delivers powerful predictive models to all users -- letting them view, analyze, build and distribute predictive reports through a zero-footprint Web interface and with the highest levels of security.

Multi-Pass SQL Analysis

The MicroStrategy platform offers iterative multi-pass SQL Analysis -- a technique that combines built-in analytical functions with database processing. Complex questions that are impossible to answer with other approaches can be answered quickly and easily with MicroStrategy. By combining powerful analytical functions with the industry's leading optimized SQL-generation engine, MicroStrategy puts unparalleled analytical capabilities in the hands of all users.