By Steve Powell and Ken Baker

Successful business modeling is as much an art as a science. Becoming an expert modeler, therefore, requires both technical knowledge and mastery of craft skills. This book brings together the three essential facets of modeling expertise:

• Spreadsheet engineering: effective methods for designing, building, and testing models, and for performing model-based analysis.

• Management science: optimization and simulation (as well as statistics), advanced analytic methods that can reveal powerful insights into business problems.

• Modeling craft: tools used by experts to generate insights from models, such as influence charts and prototyping.

With the release of the Fifth Edition, we have changed the title from Management Science to the more widely recognized term Business Analytics. The major change in this edition is the organization of Chapter 6 on data mining. To communicate the broad set of skills necessary to carry out a data mining project, we have reorganized the chapter by starting with a single algorithm and several applications. As in the previous edition, we use the software XLMiner to support both data exploration and data mining, and we have updated our coverage, exhibits and narratives as they relate to the latest versions of Office 2016 and Analytic Solver Platform.