Recent Advances in Business Analytics. Selected papers of the 2021 KNOWCON-NSAIS workshop on Business Analytics

Dear readers. Business analytics as a field is becoming more and more relevant for practice, companies are trying to utilize the data they have and obtain more relevant data in order to manage and optimize their processes as well as to reach their goals in all relevant areas including economic, societal, ecological, and sustainability-related goals. The demand for university education that would combine information science, operations research and management science, statistics and insights into economics, business and industry is still growing. Business analytics in all its forms and application areas is also becoming a strong and wide field of research. This development is being mirrored also in the growing number of conferences and research seminars that are being organized on various topics related to business analytics.

This year was the first that brought the North-European Society for Adaptive and Intelligent Systems (NSAIS) and the international conference on Knowledge in Economics and Management (KNOWCON) together to organize a joint KNOWCON-NSAIS workshop on business analytics. This event took place on November 11-12, 2021 in Olomouc, Czech Republic in the historical buildings of Palacký University Olomouc. It brought together researchers and practitioners from the field of business analytics as well as students of business analytics, economics and related subjects, and provided an inspiring place for scientific discussion of new ideas, problems to be solved and methods that are being developed by the researchers in the field. The topics discussed in the workshop and the related social events covered the use of analytics in various areas of business and finance as well as the development of new instruments and models for business and data analytics, for the processing of social science and business data, operations research, intelligent systems, machine learning and soft-computing methods, their development, analyses and use in the business and financial setting.

This issue of ACSIS presents the selected full papers the contents of which were presented and thoroughly discussed at the KNOWCON-NSAIS workshop. We are very happy that we can share with you these contributions that range from the development of machine learning methods and their application through econometric analyses to solve business problems to multiple-criteria decision-making methods dealing with uncertainty to address business, managerial and social science decision-making and evaluation problems. All the papers of this issue went through a rigorous review process by at least two independent reviewers and the assessment by the KNOWCON-NSAIS scientific committee members.

We would like to thank Palacký University Olomouc, Faculty of Arts, Department of Economic and Managerial Studies, mainly to associate professor Pavla Slavíčková, for organizing the whole event and to NSAIS for the cooperation on the organization of the workshop. We would also like to extend our thanks to all the researchers, scholars, practitioners and students that took part in the discussions and the presentations of the current research results, and also in the review process, for maintaining a high scientific quality of the discussions and for creating a very pleasant and inspiring atmosphere to share ideas and open problems and to find innovative solutions. Last but not least we would like to thank ACSIS and its editorial board for their support and kind collaboration on the creation of this issue and for the opportunity to share the recent advances in the field of business analytics represented by the selected full papers published in this issue with a wide audience of readers.