Qualitative variables are definitely part, in my experience, of every analytics project. The solution - GT data mining - cluster the qualitative together with the numeric data. It is available by service, SaaS.
Complex-and-unsupervised analytics specialist; the developer of GT data mining analytics, Founder &CEO of Procedureware.
Currently engaged in SaaS type projects, and extending GT for extensive data analytics.
GT development started in 2002, Singapore.
Education: Industrial & Management Engineer, from the Thechnion in Haifa Israel, MS in Economic Systems from NY Polytechnic.
The fall of the Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch - two companies rich in BI tools, calls for questioning the validity of those tools. Anybody knows which were the BI solutions that served in them?
To my mind, giving early warning about critical situations, is the ultimate test of a BI system. For a long time I say that statistics based analytics cannot perform this crucial test task. What we witness now may be the sad realization of that.
And a personal note: my solution, GT data mining, is not based on statistics, which enables it to interpret the data independently of users' assumptions.