Prescriptive Analytics: The Final Frontier for Evidence-Based Management and Optimal Decision Making

Dursun Delen

Oct 2019 · FT Press

About this ebook

Make Better Decisions, Leverage New Opportunities, and Automate Decisioning at Scale

Prescriptive analytics is more directly linked to successful decision-making than any other form of business analytics. It can help you systematically sort through your choices to optimize decisions, respond to new opportunities and risks with precision, and continually reflect new information into your decisioning process.

In Prescriptive Analytics, analytics expert Dr. Dursun Delen illuminates the field’s state-of-the-art methods, offering holistic insight for both professionals and students. Delen’s end-to-end, all-inclusive approach covers optimization, simulation, multi-criteria decision-making methods, inference- and heuristic-based decisioning, and more. Balancing theory and practice, he presents intuitive conceptual illustrations, realistic example problems, and real-world case studies–all designed to deliver knowledge you can use.

• Discover where prescriptive analytics fits and how it improves decision-making
• Identify optimal solutions for achieving an objective within real-world constraints
• Analyze complex systems via Monte-Carlo, discrete, and continuous simulations
• Apply powerful multi-criteria decision-making and mature expert systems and case-based reasoning
• Preview emerging techniques based on deep learning and cognitive computing

About the author

Dursun Delen, PhD, is the holder of the William S. Spears Endowed Chair in Business Administration, Patterson Family Endowed Chair in Business Analytics, Director of Research for the Center for Health Systems Innovation, and Regents Professor of Management Science and Information Systems in the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University (OSU). He received his PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management from OSU in 1997. Prior to his appointment as an Assistant Professor at OSU in 2001, he worked for a privately owned research and consultancy company, Knowledge Based Systems Inc., in College Station, Texas, as a research scientist for five years, during which he led a number of decision support, information systems, and advanced analytics-related research projects funded by federal agencies including DoD, NASA, NIST, and DOE.

Dr. Delen provides professional education and consultancy services to companies and government agencies on analytics and information systems-related topics. He is often invited to national and international conferences for invited talks and keynote addresses on topics related to data/text mining, business intelligence, decision support systems, business analytics, and knowledge management. He served as the general co-chair for the 4th International Conference on Network Computing and Advanced Information Management in Seoul, South Korea, and regularly chairs tracks and mini-tracks at various business analytics and information systems conferences.

He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles. His research has appeared in major journals, including Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Communications of the ACM, Computers and Operations Research, Computers in Industry, Journal of Production Operations Management, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and Expert Systems with Applications. He recently authored/co-authored ten books/textbooks within the broad areas of business analytics, decision support systems, data/text mining, and business intelligence. He is the editor-in-chief for the Journal of Business Analytics, AI in Business, and International Journal of Experimental Algorithms, senior editor for Decision Support Systems and Decision Sciences, associate editor for Journal of Business Research, Decision Analytics, and International Journal of RF Technologies, and is on the editorial boards of several other academic journals.