Patent Application
20090076991
The invention relates generally to computer data processing, and particularly to displaying quantitative search information with metric displays.
Business leaders and managers deal with risk in a variety of forms. One form of risk involves making decisions on less than complete information. Since real world decisions seldom involve complete information, business leaders and managers often make decisions with incomplete data and little or no knowledge about the risk that the missing data creates. In such cases, business personnel make intuitive or “gut level” assessments.
One area in which business leaders and managers make decisions based upon incomplete data involves computer generated metric displays. Computer generated metric displays depend on periodically updated input data to provide meaningful and valid indicators. Such input data is based on historical data. For example, a company providing computer services might use a graph of server traffic over time to determine when to add or decrease capacity. A manufacturing company may compare final yield of a product to determine the impact of a variable on a particular process at different time intervals. But not all historical data is available for input when needed.
Input data can be incomplete because data is missing or because a time lag occurs between when an event takes place, and when the known effects of the event are determined. Incomplete input data impacts the computer generated metric display and therefore, the ability of the business leader or manager to use the metric to analyze risk. In either case, a gap in the data of the computer generated metric affects the quality of the decision based upon the metric.
Capabilities exist for analyzing historical performance data and using the historical performance data to predict missing data points. Therefore, a need exists to integrate predictive capabilities directly into business metrics for the purpose of providing a metric with actual and predicted data.
The advanced data availability tool uses predictive analysis to fill gaps in a data set and then displays actual data, predicted data, and confidence intervals for the actual data and the predicted data. The advanced data availability tool has a data collection tool, a data table created by the data collection tool, a data table analyzer, a predicted data table, and an enhanced data display.
The data collection tool and the data table created by the data collection tool are based on existing art. The data collection tool populates the data table with historical data. The data table analyzer accesses the historical data within the data table and determines whether there are gaps in the data.
The data table analyzer uses known predictive analysis algorithms to generate predicted values for missing data in the gaps based on historical performance, actual data points immediately surrounding a gap, and local trends. The data table analyzer determines statistical confidence intervals based on the actual data and also based on a combination of the actual data and the predicted data, and saves the actual data, the predicted data, and the confidence intervals to the predicted data table.
The enhanced display program displays the actual data, the predicted data, and confidence intervals.
The principles of the present invention are applicable to a variety of computer hardware and software configurations. The term “computer hardware” or “hardware,” as used herein, refers to any machine or apparatus that is capable of accepting, performing logic operations on, storing, or displaying data, and includes without limitation processors and memory; the term “computer software” or “software,” refers to any set of instructions operable to cause computer hardware to perform an operation. A “computer,” as that term is used herein, includes without limitation any useful combination of hardware and software, and a “computer program” or “program” includes without limitation any software operable to cause computer hardware to accept, perform logic operations on, store, or display data. A computer program may, and often is, comprised of a plurality of smaller programming units, including without limitation subroutines, modules, functions, methods, and procedures. Thus, the functions of the present invention may be distributed among a plurality of computers and computer programs. The invention is described best, though, as a single computer program that configures and enables one or more general-purpose computers to implement the novel aspects of the invention. For illustrative purposes, the inventive computer program will be referred to as the “advanced data availability tool.”
Additionally, the advanced data availability tool is described below with reference to an exemplary network of hardware devices, as depicted in
Advanced data availability tool 200 typically is stored in a memory, represented schematically as memory 220 in
A preferred form of the invention has been shown in the drawings and described above, but variations in the preferred form will be apparent to those skilled in the art. The preceding description is for illustration purposes only, and the invention should not be construed as limited to the specific form shown and described. The scope of the invention should be limited only by the language of the following claims.
