The Use of Data Mining Techniques in Environmental Accounting: A Comparison of Public and Private Sector Companies in India

Abstract

Environmental accounting as an essential tool for understanding the role played by the natural environment in the economy is useful for business decisions, especially for proactive environmental management activities. Since recent technological advancement paved the way for the use of big data to assist companies in the decision-making process and one of the best methods to the exploited large dataset is data mining, this study aims to examine the level of data mining techniques in environmental accounting within public and private sector companies in India. This study covering the States of Haryana for North, West Bengal for East, Maharashtra for West and Kerala as representative of South. With the use of structured questionnaires in the soft and hard copy at last 100 managers and 243 accountants randomly were selected. Six hypothesis has been considered that were evaluated in the statements with a five-point Likert scale. In this study, we used the classification and regression techniques as appropriate tools for data mining. The results of this study confirmed the null hypothesis ‘there is no significant difference existed in the level of data mining between the public and private sector industry in India’ rejects. Therefore, the levels of data mining within environmental accounting in terms of most aspects significantly is higher in the private sector than public sector companies in India.

Keywords: Environmental Accounting, Environmental Management, Data Mining, Industry in India

View PDF