Analytics
Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance.
Business
Business is the activity of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling goods or services. Simply put, it is "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit. It does not mean it is a company, a corporation, partnership, or have any such formal organization, but it can range from a street peddler to General Motors." The term is also often used colloquially (but not by lawyers or public officials) to refer to a company, but this article will not deal with that sense of the word.
Business Analytics
Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. In contrast, business intelligence traditionally focuses on using a consistent set of metrics to both measure past performance and guide business planning, which is also based on data and statistical methods.
Data
Data ( DAY-tə, DAT-ə, DAH-tə) is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables.
Data Science
Data science is an interdisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, similar to data mining.
Science
Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Business
Despatch is the soul of business.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773). Letter, 5 February 1750.
Science
The men in the laboratory... cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all. ...The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper. ... What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions.
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
Science
Those (natural) laws cannot be circumvented by any amount of piety or cleverness, but they can be understood. Uncovering them should be the highest goal of a civilized society. Not, as we have seen, because scientists have any claim to greater intellect or virtue, but because the scientific method transcends the flaws of individual scientists. Science is the only way we have of separating the truth from ideology, or fraud, or mere foolishness.
Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science (2000), p. 211