Explanation of Exceptional Values in Multi-dimensional Business Databases

“How can the functionality of multi-dimensional business databases be extended with diagnostic capabilities to support managerial decision-making?” This question states the main research problem addressed in this thesis. Before giving an answer, the question first requires clarification and delineation. In this chapter, the research question is placed briefly into context, both regarding academic and business relevance. This leads to the formulation of three specific research questions. Subsequently, a section is dedicated to each specific research question. An outline of this thesis concludes the chapter

General Model for Automated Diagnosis of Business Performance

In this paper, we describe an extension of the methodology for explanation generation in financial knowledge-based systems, offering the possibility to automatically generate explanations and diagnostics to support business decision tasks. The central goal is the identification of specific knowledge structures and reasoning methods required to construct computerized explanations from financial data and business models. A multi-step look-ahead algorithm is proposed that deals with so-called calling-out effects, which are a common phenomenon in financial data sets. The extended methodology was tested on a case-study conducted for Statistics Netherlands involving the comparison of financial figures of firms in the Dutch retail branch. The analyses are performed with a diagnostic software application which implements our theory of explanation. Comparison of results of the classic explanation methodology with the results of the extended methodology shows significant improvements in the analyses when cancelling-out effects are present in the data

Diagnosis in the Olap Context

The purpose of OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) systems is to provide a framework for the analysis of multidimensional data. Many tasks related to analysing multidimensional data and making business decisions are still carried out manually by analysts (e.g. financial analysts, accountants, or business managers). An important and common task in multidimensional analysis is business diagnosis. Diagnosis is defined as finding the “best” explanation of observed symptoms. Today’s OLAP systems offer little support for automated business diagnosis. This functionality can be provided by extending the conventional OLAP system with an explanation formalism, which mimics the work of business decision makers in diagnostic processes. The central goal of this paper is the identification of specific knowledge structures and reasoning methods required to construct computerized explanations from multidimensional data and business models. We propose an algorithm that generates explanations for symptoms in multidimensional business data. The algorithm was tested on a fictitious case study involving the comparison of financial results of a firm’s business units