Tag Archives: PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS

Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive analytics is the third and final phase of business analytics, which also includes descriptive and predictive analytics.

Prescriptive analytics goes beyond predicting future outcomes by also suggesting actions to benefit from the predictions and showing the implications of each decision option.

Prescriptive analytics not only anticipates what will happen and when it will happen, but also why it will happen. Further, prescriptive analytics suggests decision options on how to take advantage of a future opportunity or mitigate a future risk and shows the implication of each decision option. Prescriptive analytics can continually take in new data to re-predict and re-prescribe, thus automatically improving prediction accuracy and prescribing better decision options. Prescriptive analytics ingests hybrid data, a combination of structured (numbers, categories) and unstructured data (videos, images, sounds, texts), and business rules to predict what lies ahead and to prescribe how to take advantage of this predicted future without compromising other priorities.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modelling, and machine learning, that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.

Predictive models identify patterns found in historical or transactional data to identify risks and opportunities. Models capture relationships among multiple factors to allow assessment of risk or potential associated with a particular set of conditions. The defining functional effect is a predictive or probability score for each.

One of the best-known applications is credit scoring, which is used throughout financial services. Scoring models process a customer’s credit history, loan application, customer data, etc., in order to rank-order individuals by their likelihood of making future credit payments on time.