DEA meaning in Database Management ?

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric method in operations research and economics for the estimation of production frontiers. It is used to empirically measure productive efficiency of decision making units (DMUs). Although DEA has a strong link to production theory in economics, the tool is also used for benchmarking in operations management, where a set of measures is selected to benchmark the performance of manufacturing and service operations. In benchmarking, the efficient DMUs, as defined by DEA, may not necessarily form a “production frontier”, but rather lead to a “best-practice frontier” (Charnes A., W. W. Cooper and E. Rhodes (1978)).

In contrast to parametric methods that require the ex-ante specification of a production- or cost function, non-parametric approaches compare feasible input and output combinations based on the available data only. DEA, as one of the most commonly used non-parametric methods owes its name to its enveloping property of the dataset's efficient DMUs, where the empirically observed, most efficient DMUs constitute the production frontier against which all DMUs are compared. DEA's popularity stems from its relative lack of assumptions, ability to benchmark multi-dimensional inputs and outputs as well as computational ease owing to it being expressable as a linear program, despite aiming to calculate efficiency ratios.