Every technical project involves some sort of analytics, ranging from simply reporting key facts, to predicting new events. This eBook defines ten increasingly sophisticated levels of analytics so that teams can assess where they stand and to what they aspire.
Along the way, we clarify definitions of three types of analytic inquiry and four categories of modeling technology. We illustrate these levels with examples using tabular data representations commonly found in spreadsheets and single database tables.
As our field’s ability to collect and fuse data from different sources increases, advanced data types such as time series, spatial data, and graph data are moving into the analytic mainstream. In the second portion of this eBook, we extend the Levels to encompass these emerging data types, providing data complexity as second dimension for categorization alongside algorithmic sophistication.