Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics rely on the simultaneous application of statistics and research to quantify performance. Analytics often favors data visualization to communicate insight.
The most common application of analytics is the study of business data with an eye to predicting and improving business performance in the future. Other fields within the area of analytics are enterprise decision management, retail analytics, marketing and web analytics, predictive science, credit risk analysis, and fraud analytics.
Analytics can be best defined as a science of analysis. This is most commonly used in situations where realistic judgments are necessary. Past experiences collected and rule of thumb concepts can be added to the data to create a qualitative aspect of decision making. However, without adequate data sources culled from various factors of real information, the determination cannot be said to be made with the concept of analytics.
In the nut shell – "It's Changing Numbers Into Meaning"