But data analytics has the potential to transform external auditing just as it has changed internal auditing
The power of data analytics could make it possible for external financial statement auditors to improve audits by: Testing complete sets of data, rather than just testing samples
The IAASB defines data analytics for audit as the science and art of discovering and analysing patterns, deviations and inconsistencies, and extracting other useful information in the data underlying or related to the subject matter of an audit through analysis, modelling and visualisation for the purpose of planning and performing the audit
The technology landscape for data analytics in internal audit has expanded rapidly as new categories of tools, such as self-service analytics and visualization tools, have entered the market
While the features of these tools have expanded and become more accessible for non- technical users, the cost has also dropped dramatically
Cloud-based data analytics service
Azure Data Explorer is a fully-managed big data analytics cloud platform and data-exploration service
Semi-structured and unstructured data.The service then stores this data and answers analytic ad hoc queries on it with seconds of latency.It is a full text indexing and retrieval database
Including :Time series analysis capabilities and regular expression evaluation and text parsing.
Data analysis techniques for fraud detection
Fraud represents a significant problem for governments and businesses and specialized analysis techniques for discovering fraud using them are required.Some of these methods include
Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD)
Data miningMachine learning and statistics.They offer applicable and successful solutions in different areas of electronic fraud crimes.
Origins and events of data
Data lineage includes
And where it moves over time.Data lineage provides visibility and simplifies tracing errors back to the root cause in a data analytics process.
Centralized storage of knowledge
Also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW)
Is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence.Data warehouses are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources.They store current and historical data in one single place that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise.This is beneficial for companies as it enables them to interrogate and draw insights from their data and make decisions.
Statistical techniques analyzing facts to make predictions about unknown events
Predictive analytics is a form of business analytics applying machine learning to generate a predictive model for certain business applications.As such
It encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from predictive modeling and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.It represents a major subset of machine learning applications; in some contexts
It is synonymous with machine learning.
Measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data
Web analytics is the measurement
And reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage.Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research and assess and improve website effectiveness.Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns.It can be used to estimate how traffic to a website changes after launching a new advertising campaign.Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views
Or create user behavior profiles.It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends
Which is useful for market research.
