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Modeling tips & tricks

Learn from our team of modeling experts and the decision analysis community on best practices for model building. Here you will find information about Analytica, as well as general tips and tricks. Topics include how to go about structuring a complex problem, how to analyze models using sensitivity and scenario analysis, and tips on selecting graphs and maps to provide clearer insights. Overall we want to guide you and your organization to be better decision makers, no matter what industry or field you work in.

For more a more comprehensive list of tutorials, user guides, videos, example models, and libraries, check out our Analytica Docs website.

Experimenting with business analytics

How do you see the business analytics trio of descriptive, predictive and decision analytics? If you see these activities as mechanical IT processes, you may well head off into ...

Saving time, money, and the environment: the growing importance of early-stage energy modeling

Which is better? A model to figure out how much energy you’re wasting, or a model to help you save energy from the outset? In a world that has become energy-conscious to a much ...

Sensitivity analysis: one at a time or all together?

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, say Aristotle and Gestalt psychology. The whole effect of combined factors of a model in terms of sensitivity may also be greater ...

Can back-testing improve your strategic risk management?

Back testing is a favorite with those who want to test out a plan for the future with real data. The real data for the future are not (of course) yet available, however the data ...

Decision support systems: an extended taxonomy

Slicing and dicing data for insights and conclusions is all part of the decision support process. But decision support systems themselves can be sliced and diced to segment them ...

Measuring uncertainty & understanding propagation

I used to be uncertain, but now I’m not so sure. Whatever the cause, uncertainty is a fundamental part of the real world and has to be dealt with. By way of a definition, ...

5 business intelligence (BI) steps to smooth out a rocky road

In theory, business intelligence transforms the raw data of organizations into information useful to them at the click of a mouse. Dashboards are updated in real time to give ...

The nuts & bolts of transportation modeling

Transportation modeling is one of the big applications of operations research methods. It lends itself to analysis using many of the techniques in OR and is also fundamental in ...

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    The free edition of Analytica includes these key Analytica features:
    Free Analytica has no time limit. The only constraint is it won’t let you create more than 100 variables or other objects. But your model can be quite substantial since each variable can be a multidimensional array. It also lets you explore, change inputs, and run existing models of any size (excluding features unique to the Enterprise or Optimizer editions).