Lavastorm Democratizes Predictive Analytics for Business Analysts

SOURCE: LavaStorm Analytics

BOSTON – February 3, 2015 – Lavastorm Analytics, a leading agile data management and analytics software company, today announced new functionality within its Lavastorm Analytics Engine platform that enables business analysts who have a limited knowledge of complex data science to deliver business-impacting insights using predictive analytics. Business analysts can now leverage key aspects of data science without requiring a specialized educational background in advanced analytics.

Business analysts typically encounter a host of core problems when trying to utilize predictive analytics.  They lack the necessary skills and training of data scientists to work in complex programming environments like R. Additionally, many existing business intelligence tools are not tailored to enable self-service data assembly for business analysts to marry rich data sets with their essential business knowledge. Finally, there is a lack of transparency and collaboration between business analysts, IT and data scientists to implement and realize the true value of data models within their organization.

Lavastorm’s new and improved approach to democratizing predictive analytics solves each of these problems by giving business analysts drag-and-drop capabilities specifically designed to help them master predictive analytics. The addition of this capability within the Lavastorm Analytics Engine’s visual, data flow-driven approach enables a fundamentally new method for authoring advanced analyses by providing a single shared canvas upon which users with complementary skill sets can collaborate to rapidly produce robust, trusted analytical applications.

“Demand for advanced analytic capabilities from companies across the globe is growing exponentially, but data scientists or those with specialized backgrounds around predictive analytics are in short supply,” said Drew Rockwell, CEO of Lavastorm. “Business analysts have a wealth of valuable data and valuable business knowledge, and with the Lavastorm Analytic Engine, are perfectly positioned to move beyond their current expertise in descriptive analytics to focus on the future, predicting what will happen, helping their companies compete and win on analytics.”

The all-in-one Lavastorm Analytics Engine platform provides an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop data preparation environment to provide business analysts a self-serve predictive analytics solution that gives them more power and a step-by-step validation for their visualization tools.

New Predictive Analytics Features for Business Analysts

– Linear Regression: Calculate a line of best fit to estimate the values of a variable of interest

– Logistic Regression: Calculate probabilities of binary outcomes

– K-Means Clustering: Form a user-specified number of clusters out of data sets based on user-defined criteria

– Hierarchical Clustering: Form a user-specified number of clusters out of data sets by using an iterative process of cluster merging

– Decision Tree: Predict outcomes by identifying patterns from an existing data set

The new predictive analytics features for business analytics are available to Lavastorm customers beginning today. They are the first set in a series of analytical components which will be continually added to this library. Lavastorm will be providing ongoing webinars and other educational content to facilitate the adoption of this new functionality, enabling a new class of business users to not only use the software productively, but to increase their skill set across a range of advanced analytical techniques.

About Lavastorm Analytics

Lavastorm is the agile data management and analytics company trusted by enterprises seeking an analytic advantage. The company’s data discovery platform empowers business professionals and analysts with the fastest, most accurate way to discover and transform insights into business improvements, while providing IT with control over data governance. The company’s solutions have identified business improvements worth billions of dollars for some of the largest corporations in the world. A global company, Lavastorm is headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices throughout EMEA and Asia-Pacific. For more information, please visit www.lavastorm.com, read the company blog http://www.lavastorm.com/blog/, or follow Lavastorm on Twitter @Lavastorm_News.