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What-If Analysis

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Definition

In order to be able to evaluate beforehand the impact of a strategic or tactical move so as to plan optimal strategies to reach their goals, decision makers need reliable predictive systems. What-if analysis is a data-intensive simulation whose goal is to inspect the behavior of a complex system, such as the corporate business or a part of it, under some given hypotheses called scenarios. In particular, what-if analysis measures how changes in a set of independent variables impact a set of dependent variables with reference to a given simulation model such a model is a simplified representation of the business, tuned according to the historical corporate data. In practice, formulating a scenario enables the building of a hypothetical world that the analyst can then query and navigate.

Historical Background

Though what-if analysis can be considered as a relatively recent discipline, its background is rooted at the confluence of different research areas, some of which date...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bologna, Bologna,  , Italy

    Stefano Rizzi

Authors
  1. Stefano Rizzi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Rizzi, S. (2009). What-If Analysis. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_466

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