Tim Bass
08-19-2008 07:09 AM
Peter Lin comments*in A Complex Event = Sum (Events) + Situational Knowledge,*continuing*the discussion by asking*”What is the definition of analytics? Is it purely a calculation, or something else?”

A good place to being to look for clues to an answer is Wikipedia, where the opinion of the author there is,

*”A simple and practical definition, however, would be how an entity (i.e., business) arrives at an optimal or realistic decision based on existing data.”

Quoting your Wikipedia author(s) further,

“Common applications of Analytics include the study of business data using statistical analysis in order to discover and understand historical patterns with an eye to predicting and improving business performance in the future. Also, some people use the term to denote the use of mathematics in business. Others hold that field of analytics include the use of Operations Research, Statistics and Probability. However, it would be erroneous to limit the field of analytics to only statistics and mathematics.”

The Wikipedia author(s) goes on to further discuss analytics, as follows;

“Analytics closely resembles statistical analysis and data mining, but tends to be based on modeling involving extensive computation. Some fields within the area of analytics are enterprise decision management, marketing analytics, predictive science, strategy science, credit risk analysis and fraud analytics.”

All of these topics*above are CEP-related areas involving complex events and situations based on the need for optimal and reliable real-time capabilities to make meaningful (business) decisions.*

Simple pattern matching, event mediation and routing, and basic mathematical calculations do not really fall into the realm of complex event processing.* Instead, CEP is real-time decision support based on modeling*and “extensive” computation.* In a nutshell, complex events and situations*require analytical models that are non-trivial and that is why without analytics, there is no true “complex event processing.”



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