SHORT-ANSWER QUESTIONS

1. What are the four types of decision discussed in this chapter? Give an example of
each.

2. What type of information is a geographic information system designed

specifically to work with?

3. What are the five intelligence-related tasks that data-mining tools and models
help you address?

4. What is predictive analytics?

5. What is text analytics?

6. What sort of problems is an expert system used for?

7. What sort of problem does a neural network solve?

8. Why is fuzzy logic important to text analytics?

9. What is an agent-based technology?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. WHICH SOFTWARE WOULD YOU USE? Which type or types of computer-aided

decision support software would you use for each of the situations in the
following tasks? Note why you think each of your choices is appropriate. The
decision support alternatives are:
 Decision support system
 Geographic information system
 Expert system
 Neural network
 Genetic algorithm
 Intelligent agent

Problem Type of Decision

Support
You and another marketing executive on a different
continent want to develop a new pricing structure for
products
You want to predict when customers are about to take
their business elsewhere
You want to fill out a short tax form
You want to determine the fastest route for package
delivery to 23 different addresses in a city
You want to decide where to spend advertising dollars
 (TV, radio, newspaper, direct mail, e-mail)
You want to keep track of competitors’ prices for
comparable goods and services

2. IDENTIFYING PREDICTIVE INDICATORS Think about your school and its building
of a predictive analytics model. What do you believe would be the ten most
important predictive indicators for determining whether or not an applicant to
your school will attend if accepted? Think very broadly here in terms of all the
factors a potential student might use in making his or her choice.

3. Consider the topic of data warehouses in Chapter 3. In the future, AI systems will
be increasingly applied to data warehouse processing. Which AI systems do you
think might be helpful? For which tasks, or situations, might they best be
applied? Do you think that AI systems will someday play a greater role in the
design of databases and data warehouses? Why or why not?

4. Consider the differences and similarities among the four AI techniques discussed
in this chapter. Name some problems that might be amenable to more than one
type of AI system. Say you sell baseballs from your Web site. What types of AI
systems could you use to generate information that would be useful to you in
deciding what direction to take your company in the future? If you were pretty
successful at selling baseballs, would you expect to have the amount of
information on customers that, say Wal-Mart, has? Why or why not?

5. What type of AI systems could your school use to help with registration?
Intelligent agents find vast amounts of information very quickly. Neural networks
can classify patterns simultaneously. What sort of information might your school
administration be able to generate using these (or other AI systems)?