Predictive Analytics vs. Advanced Analytics

Advanced Analytics, is the more sophisticated and complex part of the field of analytics, Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Text Analytics, etc. are all essentially advanced analytics. 

Advanced Analytics is an emergent digital technology, there are many concepts need to be continually better refined, classified or clarified, for example, what is analytics, what is predictive analytics, what is advanced analytics. More often, there is lack of a shared vocabulary and it takes time to reach both technology and knowledge maturity of analytics. Organizations have overlapping business objectives, how to apply different type of analytics to solving important business problems is the very reason why analytics is so hot these days.

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques, from modeling, machine learning, and data mining that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future, or otherwise unknown events (Wikipedia). Advanced analytics refers to future-oriented analyses, that can be used to help drive changes and improvements in business practices. (Whatis). To qualify under Advanced Analytics, there needs to be some level of sophistication but obviously the line between simple and advanced is fuzzy as well.

Predictive Analytics is a type of Advanced Analytics. Predictive analytics refers to the flavor of analytics where current and historical data is exploited using techniques from data mining, statistics, machine learning etc. Advanced Analytics refers to a flavor of analytics under the purview of which, amalgamation of advanced statistical techniques are effective. It encompasses many other techniques other than those being used in Predictive Analytics. Predictive analytic is just one aspect of the broader topic of Advanced analytics. More specifically, Advanced analytics encompasses data mining, predictive analytics, big data analytics, location analytics and so on.

Advanced analytics provides algorithms for complex analysis of either structured or unstructured data. It includes sophisticated statistical techniques, machine learning, text analytics, and other advanced data mining techniques. Advanced statistical techniques are used to assess the efficacy of certain difficult-to-assess program implementations. They could not be cleanly assessed with the more traditional evaluation approaches. Predictive analytics is essentially a type of advanced analytics. But predictive analytics might also go beyond the type of advanced analytics that looks only at historical data to analyze patterns and relationships in order to predict the future.

Advanced Analytics = Predictive Analytics + Text Analytics + other unstructured analytics. The reality is that there are many forms of what being considered advanced analytics aside from predictive and even text analytics. What about video analytics? Speech analytics? Or even Link analysis? Stream mining? Forms of geospatial analytics, etc. Sometimes, people are too constrained when thinking about analytics. Besides predictive analytics such as data mining or pattern recognition, there are other forms of analytics out there. And they may arise out of areas that are not classical statistical analysis, although there may be overlap... For instance, while techniques like text analytics can be used in the predictive analytics space too, and there are probably some classification algorithms used in some kinds of text analytics; text analytics and predictive analytics are different, although both are forms of advanced analytics.

Advanced Analytics, is the more sophisticated and complex part of the field of analytics, Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Text Analytics, etc. are all essentially advanced analytics. Advanced analytics "techniques" is used to predict future outcomes vs. Predictive analytics helps your organization predict future outcomes with confidence.