Our books are written to be software independent. That is, your students can gain an understanding of the potential and actual use of analytics without any specific software. However, to give a hands-on exposure to some tools, we share our own experiences and resources. This list is just to get you started. There are many other options in each category.
Descriptive/Reporting Analytics
We have used three packages for an introduction to descriptive analytics:
MicroStrategy is available through Teradata University Network (TUN). This includes a full tutorial and homework assignments using a sample data set. Faculty and student registration for TUN is required, but it is free.
Tableau Visualization makes an academic version available to students at this link: http://www.tableausoftware.com/academic
SAS Visual Analytics can also be found through TUN.
Predictive Analytics
There are many different software tools available for faculty and students to develop skills and experiences in predictive analytics. We ourselves have used the following tools recently:
SAS Enterprise Miner – A commercial data/text mining software tool – see Academic Program
IBM SPSS Modeler – A commercial data/text mining software tool – see Academic Alliance
Statistica – A commercial data/text mining software tool
RapidMiner – An open source data and text mining tool
KNIME – A free data and text mining tool
WEKA – An open source data and text mining tool
Tanagra – A freeware data mining tool
R – A community project for analytics and statistics
Prescriptive Analytics
There are many tools available for Prescriptive Analytics, depending upon specific applications category. OR/MS Today includes software reference and links for information on many of these tools:
Chapter 9 of the DSS Book refers to the following tools:
Microsoft Excel – built-in software. Used for linear, integer, and nonlinear programming models.
Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) – the Expert Choice or freeware app Hipre
Simulation – we primarily use Simio to teach simulation in our analytics courses.