This book explores emerging research and pedagogy in analytics and data science that have become core to many businesses as they work to derive value from data. The chapters examine the role of analytics and data science to create, spread, develop and utilize analytics applications for practice. Selected chapters provide a good balance between discussing research advances and pedagogical tools in key topic areas in analytics and data science in a systematic manner. This book also focuses on several business applications of these emerging technologies in decision making, i.e., business analytics. The chapters in Analytics and Data Science: Advances in Research and Pedagogy are written by leading academics and practitioners that participated at the Business Analytics Congress 2015.

Applications of analytics and data science technologies in various domains are still evolving. For instance, the explosive growth in big data and social media analytics requiresexamination of the impact of these technologies and applications on business and society. As organizations in various sectors formulate their IT strategies and investments, it is imperative to understand how various analytics and data science approaches contribute to the improvements in organizational information processing and decision making. Recent advances in computational capacities coupled by improvements in areas such as data warehousing, big data, analytics, semantics, predictive and descriptive analytics, visualization, and real-time analytics have particularly strong implications on the growth of analytics and data science.