Behavior Informatics and Analytics: A New and Promising Area

Behavior is increasingly recognized as a key component in business intelligence and problem-solving. Different from traditional behavior analysis, which mainly focus on implicit behavior and explicit business appearance as a result of business usage and customer demographics, this paper proposes the field of Behavior Informatics and Analytics (BIA), to support explicit behavior involvement through a conversion from transactional data to behavioral data, and further genuine analysis of native behavior patterns and impacts. BIA consists of key components including behavior modeling and representation, behavioral data construction, behavior impact modeling, behavior pattern analysis, and behavior presentation. BIA can greatly complement the existing means for combined, more informative and social patterns and solutions for critical problem-solving in areas such as dealing with customer-officer interaction, counterterrorism and monitoring online communities.