Authors:
Emiel Caron
1
and
Hennie Daniels
2
Affiliations:
1
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
;
2
Tilburg University; Erasmus University, Netherlands
Keyword(s):
Business intelligence, Multi-dimensional databases, OLAP, What-if analysis, Sensitivity analysis.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Business Analytics
;
Data Engineering
;
Data Mining
;
Data Warehouses and OLAP
;
Databases and Information Systems Integration
;
Datamining
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Information Systems
;
Sensor Networks
;
Signal Processing
;
Soft Computing
;
Strategic Decision Support Systems
Abstract:
Today’s OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) or multi-dimensional databases have limited support for whatif or sensitivity analysis. What-if analysis is the analysis of how the variation in the output of a mathematical model can be assigned to different sources of variation in the model’s input. This functionality would give the OLAP analyst the possibility to play with “What if ...?”-questions in an OLAP cube. For example, with questions of the form: “What happens to an aggregated value in the dimension hierarchy if I change the value
of this data cell by so much?” These types of questions are, for example, important for managers that want to analyse the effect of changes in sales on a product’s profitability in an OLAP supermarket sales cube. In this paper, we extend the functionality of the OLAP database with what-if analysis.