David--
I think the business/marketing use of the term Analytics (from the
Greek analutik� "principles of mathematical analysis" but used to mean
just analysis rather than principles of analysis) dates from the last
decade--see refs at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_analytics
and was probably helped by Google et al.:
http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics
http://pped.org/stata/ssc2.gif
(that last one is SSC hits by country).
There are some interesting problems in the field, I suppose, some of
which masquerade as "fraud detection" by credit card companies, or
"terrorist detection" by the NSA, CIA, etc., but really are various
forms of minimum-entropy estimation problems on very large
error-ridden datasets. Leading occasionally to your credit card being
turned down or some random (or at least incorrectly identified) person
being arrested.
For a funny definition, see http://chatmine.com/glossary/index.htm :
Analytics (statistical inferencing) Chatmine uses a variety of
statistical techniques to provide you inferential testing. We use
factor, PCA, decision or probability trees, discriminant analysis and
test the predictions (T, F and Chisquare tests). These give you a
deeper understanding as well as relevance of our findings to larger
populations. For example, is there a significant difference between
gaming purchases made between expert and novice players?
Well, it seemed funny to me, anyway.
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