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Twelve Basic Predictive Analytics Techniques

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Predictive analytics is a solution used by many businesses today to gain more value out of large amounts of raw data by applying techniques that are used to predict future behaviors within an organization, it’s customer base, it’s products and services. Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techniques from data mining, stastics and game theory that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events.

Predictive models examine patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify opportunities and risks. Predictive models capture relationships among many factors to allow assessment of risk or potential associated with a particular set of conditions, guiding decision making for candidate transactions.

There are some basic and more complex predictive analytics techniques. Three basic techniques include:

Data Profiling and Transformations
Sequential Pattern Analysis
Time Series Tracking.

Data profiling and transformations are functions that analyze row and column attributes and dependencies, change data formats, merge fields, aggregate records, and join rows and columns.

Sequential pattern analysis discovers relationships between rows of data. Sequential pattern analysis is used to identify frequently observed sequential occurrence of items across ordered transactions over time. Such a frequently observed sequential occurrence of items (called a sequential pattern) must satisfy a user-specified minimum support. Understanding long-term customer purchase behavior is an example of the sequential pattern analysis. Other examples include customer shopping sequences, click-stream sessions, and telephone calling patterns.

Time series tracking tracks metrics that represent key behaviors or business strategies. It is an ordered sequence of values of a variable at equally spaced time intervals. Time series analysis accounts for the fact that data points taken over time may have an internal structure (such as autocorrelation, trend or seasonal variation) that should be accounted for. Examples include patterning customer sales that indicate product satisfaction and buying habits, budgetary analysis, stock market analysis, census analysis, and workforce projections.

More advanced predictive analytics techniques include:

Time Series Forecasting
Data Profiling and Transformations
Bayesian Analytics
Regression
Classification
Dependency or Association Analysis
Simulation
Optimization

Time series forecasting predicts the future value of a measure based on past values. Time series forecasting uses a model to forecast future events based on known past events. Examples include stock prices and sales revenue.

Data profiling and transformation uses functions that analyze row and column attributes and dependencies, change data formats, merge fields, aggregate records, and join rows and columns.

Bayesian analytics capture the concepts used in probability forecasting. It is a statistical procedure which estimate parameters of an underlying distribution based on the observed distribution. An example is used in a court setting by an individual juror to coherently accumulate the evidence for and against the guilt of the defendant, and to see whether, in totality, it meets their threshold for ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.

Regression analysis is a statistical tool for the investigation of relationships between variables. Usually, the investigator seeks to ascertain the causal effect of one variable upon another-the effect of a price increase upon demand, for example, or the effect of changes in the money supply upon the inflation rate.

Classification used attributes in data to assign an object to a predefined class or predict the value of a numeric variable of interest. Examples include credit risk analysis, likelihood to purchase. Examples include acquisition, cross-sell, attrition, credit scoring and collections.

Clustering or segmentation separates data into homogeneous subgroups based on attributes. Clustering assigns a set of observations into subsets (clusters) so that observations in the same cluster are similar. An example is customer demographic segmentation.

Dependency or association analysis describes significant associations between data items. An example is market basket analysis. Market basket analysis is a modeling technique based upon the theory that if you buy a certain group of items, you are more (or less) likely to buy another group of items.

Simulation models a system structure to estimate the impact of management decisions or changes. Simulation model behavior will change in each simulation according to the set of initial parameters assumed for the environment. Examples include inventory reorder policies, currency hedging, military training.

Optimization models a system structure in terms of constraints to find the best possible solution. Optimization models form part of a larger system which people use to help them make decisions. The user is able to influence the solutions which the model produces and reviews them before making a final decision as to what to do. Examples include scheduling of shift workers, routing of train cargo, and pricing airline seats.

About Victor Holman

Victor Holman is a business performance and growth strategy coach, consultant, international speaker, entrepreneur and creator of the Business Performance Portal. He has provided his expertise to over 50 government agencies worldwide and hundreds of corporations of all sizes. His goal is to help small businesses outperform their competition by applying business growth strategies and assessment tools that work for large, successful businesses.

He provides business consulting for small and large size organizations, business coaching, team performance workshops, and in-depth on-site business assessments for business owners trying to take their business to the next level. His highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club delivers fast, simple, easy to implement strategies for growing your business fast!

You can access his FREE business assessment tools, business management kits, business training programs, videos, templates, and more at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com

The Systematic Approach To Formulating Your Business Strategy

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If you find the prospect of crafting a Business strategy over aweing – you are not the only one. The truth is that many Business entrepreneurs don’t really see the need. Nevertheless the is that most successful businesses have well defined business strategies.

A robust business strategy can mean the difference between a lucrative business and you working 60 to 80 hours a week all year long – and not making enough to make ends meet

On the other hand, many high performing entrepreneurs who have a business strategy are not married to their business and make piles of money – and they usually attribute their fortune to having a strategic plan which guides their business.

Your Business Strategy determines the focus, vision and aims for your whole company. A written business strategy will help guide, but not dictate, your day-to-day operations. Defining, sharing and communicating your business strategy influences and guides operational decisions.

So what is the process for preparing your business strategy?

1. Define your business vision. In your perfect world, just what your business look like What markets would you seek to dominate?

2. Decide your company’s core operating values? You are looking for the core beliefs and values that you wish your company to be known for. Once your key values are clear they form your guiding principles. In other words, why are you in business and how do you do business?

3. Strategy concerns long-term plans. Your strategic is based on the over arching objectives that will help you get from where you are now, to where you want to be.

4. Medium Term Planning. Strategy is about the large scale – long time scale. You need to include elements to guide your day to day, short-term performance. Remember to be “SMART” when setting your annual goals SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. As with any plan you need to define the tasks, who by and when. Figure out what resources you’ve already got, and what resources you need to get you past any barriers. And then create an action plan that clearly lays out how you will achieve your goals. Consulting with your staff will deliver much richer solutions.

5. It is important that you carefully monitor progress on your strategy and plans. Develop a set of milestones. Don’t underestimate the importance of this step. Being able to communicate progress to all stakeholders: investors, shareholders, partners, staff, customers and your local community is immensely powerful.

6. Communicate your strategy and plan. The short-term plan from your strategy creates the momentum and direction for your day to day activities.

7. Walk the Talk. Now that you have the roadmap, it’s time to begin the journey.

8. Make sure you know exactly how you are doing on a day by day basis. Create a dashboard to report on your key performance indicators.Prompt corrective action is often more important that the plan itself.

9. Follow the same cycle next year. (Dream, Plan, Act, Check).

Building a robust, realistic and achievable business strategy is not easy. It requires commitment, effort and discipline. Yet the rewards are obvious. Juat about every successful business has an active, documented business strategy.

How To Integrate A Squeeze Page Into Your WordPress Blog

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Including a squeeze page into your WordPress blog or Blogspot website is critical to ensuring that you gather as many subscribers as possible. In order to decide how to do this you must first understand what a squeeze page is. There are two common schools of thought about what a squeeze page is. The first is the most common, which is simple a page that solely an email capture page and nothing else. Others think that it can be a page that also includes other information and links as well.

There are several different ways that you can utilize a squeeze page with your blog. Let’s take a quick look at them and what advantages they will give your blog and your business.

1. Semi-Squeeze Page

This is a small section of your website that exists on every page, usually in the upper right hand corner. It can be a large section enticing people to sign up for your list for a free trial or additional free product like an ebook, video, or audio. My personal favorite twist to this strategy are the peel-away ads. Those small ads in the upper right hand corner, that make it look like your website peels away to reveal a free offer. This type of strategy has the advantage of existing on any number of pages. It can just be on your homepage or every single post. It is up to you.

2. Static Homepage

This type of strategy is when you have a static homepage for your blog that is actually a squeeze page. This means that everyone will see this squeeze page when the first look at your blog. The obvious advantage is that every person will see your squeeze page, possibly multiple times. The drawback, however, is that people can get sick of these pages quickly and possible quit looking at your website. This means that your static homepage needs to be a quality squeeze page, yet still have useful links and advice that allows people easily navigate to your actual posts.

4. Back Door Squeeze Page

This type of setup is continually a high conversion and minimally intrusive to your visitors. You create a separate squeeze page for your blog or website that redirects automatically to your blog after visitors sign up for your list, or simply click on a link that leads directly to your blog. Next, you focus all of your marketing efforts to push people to your squeeze page and let your blog essentially advertise itself through simple methods like bookmarking. By using all of your other efforts to push your squeeze page, it will not only attract more customers, but your page ranking will climb. This means that all organic or search engine traffic that appears get sent directly to your back door squeeze page.

All 3 of these strategies have been proven effective. However, some may work better for WordPress than for Blogspot. Take some time and decide where you want your squeeze page to be and how you want it to interact with your website. This is ensure that you choose an option that not only suits your needs,but also the expectations of your visitors.

Cloud Migration Strategy For Enterprises

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Most of us use the cloud services without even knowing it. If you are using any internet service like Facebook or a smartphone app where you give out your information or upload your pictures and other information you are most probably using a cloud service. So, what is a cloud service? .Services offered by companies who store the information of various business organizations and even the information of an individual who uses the services of internet based companies like job websites, social networking websites and other services using data center, which is a centralized location for the storage, management and circulating data and information for a particular business.

Benefits of Cloud Computingfor Enterprises

Cloud computing provides enterprises with services in the form of software,platform and infrastructure. Cloud computing service providers make sure that your data is secure and is accessible to the authorized persons. One of the best benefit of cloud computing is that it provides scalability, so if you plan to grow your business you dont need to worry about the infrastructure to accommodate the workload. The employees of the enterprises can work from any location using the internet with their security access credentials. This makes enterprises to work more efficiently without worrying about the data loss due to power fluctuation or natural calamities. One of the biggest advantages of using cloud computing is that it is cost efficient. It lowers the company IT expenses and you dont need to worry about upgrading and maintaining the IT expenses on your own. It provides enterprises with unlimited storage space for their data

Drawbacks of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is dependent on the internet connection. You need to have a fast internet connection to access the services. If you have intermittent internet connection or slow internet speed issues, you might want to fix them before switching to cloud services. One of the major concerns with the cloud services is the security. Storing the valuable company data using a third party cloud service provider puts the information at a great risk. Also the enterprise data is vulnerable to threats and attacks from hackers which hesitate some of the enterprises to switch to the cloud based services.

Effective ways to use Cloud Computing

Using Cloud service has both advantages and disadvantages based on the strategies implemented by the enterprises. An enterprise requires a Cloud service provider which ensures the security and scalability of the data. More importantly if the data can be migrated in the future, if the company decided to use the service from other cloud service providers. Enterprises need to choose a service provider that takes the security of the data seriously and updates their security sensors regularly to protect the information from the latest threats and hacks. All the data must be classified according to the importance of each section. All the data must be stored in correlating manner to prevent the data from being manipulated and avoid redundancy. But with more and more improvements in the cloud services, many Enterprises and mostly the startups are switching to cloud based services.

Lenders To Avoid – Business Loan And Commercial Mortgage

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I have published many articles which are designed to assist commercial borrowers in avoiding commercial loan problems. One of the most serious commercial mortgage business loan situations is a commercial lender that causes problems for their commercial borrowers on a recurring basis. It is particularly this type of commercial lender which prudent commercial borrowers should be prepared to avoid unless viable alternative business financing options do not realistically exist.

As a direct result of my commercial loan experiences advising business owners for over 25 years and regular conversations with other business financing professionals, I do in fact believe that there are a number of commercial lenders that should be avoided. This conclusion is based on a recurring pattern of lending abuses by some business lenders.

This article will not name specific lenders to avoid, but specific examples will be provided to show why informed commercial borrowers should be ready to avoid a variety of business lenders in their search for viable commercial loan solutions. This business financing strategy article will illustrate the significant benefits of avoiding “problem lenders”.

Meaningless Pre-approvals for a Commercial Mortgage Business Loan

An early commercial mortgage pre-approval is often sought by commercial borrowers. The expected advantage to this initial commercial loan approval is that the business borrower can make other business arrangements which are based on the business financing being completed.

An ethical commercial lender will treat any form of business financing approval very seriously. Commercial borrowers should expect that a meaningful version of such an approval will not be realistically possible in just two or three days.

However, there are lenders who prepare a misleading and questionable version of a pre-approval shortly after receiving minimal application data. Because this approach often produces surprises for the borrower as the commercial mortgage process moves forward, borrowers should be wary of any lenders that do this.

Why do some commercial lenders provide such meaningless pre-approvals for a commercial mortgage? There are two likely reasons. (1) To motivate the commercial borrower to stop considering other potential commercial lenders. (2) To provide a business loan pre-approval that is similar to a structure prevalent with residential loans.

Because many commercial loan situations are facilitated by residential mortgage brokers who are typically unfamiliar with normal business financing requirements, this reason will be especially relevant with business lenders that primarily work with residential mortgage brokerage firms. Such a lender should be avoided for most commercial mortgage circumstances.

Commercial Mortgage Loan – Yes or No?

I have published an article which discusses the tendency of many banks to say “yes” when they mean “no”. Such banks will typically attach onerous business financing conditions to commercial loans instead of simply declining the loan. Business owners should explore other commercial mortgage alternatives before accepting commercial financing terms that put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Think Outside the Bank for a Commercial Mortgage

In some non-competitive business markets, it is unfortunately common for a lender to employ business loan terms that would typically not be seen in a more competitive commercial loan environment. Such business lenders can repeatedly take advantage of a non-competitive commercial lending imbalance.

An appropriate response by commercial borrowers is to seek out non-bank commercial loan options. It is neither necessary nor wise for commercial borrowers to depend only upon local traditional banks for commercial mortgage solutions. For most business loan situations, a non-local and non-bank commercial lender is likely to provide improved business financing terms because they are accustomed to competing aggressively with other commercial lenders.

Commercial Property Commercial Loan Appraisals

For commercial mortgage loans, commercial appraisals are an unavoidable part of the commercial loan underwriting process. The commercial appraisal process is lengthy and expensive, so avoiding commercial lenders which have displayed a pattern of problems and abuses in this area will benefit the commercial borrower by saving them both time and money.

Copyright 1995-2007 AEX Commercial Financing Group and Stephen Bush. All Rights Reserved.