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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4683–4688Cite as

What-If Analysis

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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. This 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 back...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DISI, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Rizzi

Authors
  1. Stefano Rizzi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefano Rizzi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Torben Bach Pedersen

  2. DISI, Univ. of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Rizzi

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Rizzi, S. (2018). What-If Analysis. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_466

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