What-If Analysis Task

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A What-If Analysis Task is a hypothetical-situation analysis task that ...



References

2006

  • (Golfarelli et al., 2006) ⇒ Matteo Golfarelli, Stefano Rizzi, and Andrea Proli. (2006). “Designing What-if Analysis: Towards a Methodology.” In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM international workshop on Data warehousing and OLAP. ISBN:1-59593-530-4 doi:10.1145/1183512.1183523
    • QUOTE: ... what-if analysis can be described as a data-intensive simulation whose goal is to inspect the behavior of a complex system (i.e., the enterprise business or a part of it) under some given hypotheses (called scenarios). More pragmatically, what-if analysis measures how changes in a set of independent variables impact on a set of dependent variables with reference to a given simulation model [20]; such model is a simplified representation of the business, tuned according to the historical enterprise data. A simple example of what-if query in the marketing domain is: How would my profits change if I run a 3 × 2 promotion for one week on some products on sale?

       What-if analysis should not be confused with sensitivity analysis, aimed at evaluating how sensitive is the behavior of the system to a small change of one or more parameters. Besides, there is an important difference between what-if analysis and simple forecasting, widely used especially in the banking and insurance fields. In fact, while forecasting is normally carried out by extrapolating trends out of the historical series stored in information systems, what-if analysis requires to simulate complex phenomena whose effects cannot be simply determined as a projection of past data, which in turn requires to build a simulation model capable of reproducing – with satisfactory approximation – the real behavior of the business. For the same reason, the design of what-if applications is also more complex than that of conventional DWs, which only relies on a static model of business.

1988