Analytics is the Link between Information and Knowledge; but What's the Link between Knowledge and Wisdom?
The evolutionary journey of data analytics reflects the
trend moving from analyzing historical perspective into capturing business
foresight, from operational perception to customer insight; from predicting what
will happen to step further: What should you do upon it; or put simply, from traditional BI into advanced analytics; and from
predictive analytics to prescriptive analytics.
Predictive Analytics
is to predict future outcomes; Prescriptive Analytics goes one step beyond and tell us not only what might happen (prediction)
but also prescribes an action (Prescription) in order to convert the
information into actionable knowledge.
Predictive
Analytics is to win foresight: What will happen? Which customers are
most likely to respond to your next offer? What do customers want for the next
cycle of products/services? Prescriptive
Analytics is to lead decision making: What should you do? Which
offer should you make to customers? Though prescriptive analytics need not be confined to actions taken based on predictive analyses. One could prescribe many things analytically without predictive response analyses.
Logic scenario from decision to action: You have your past data -> Model building
-> Prediction based on your model -> Action based on prediction and its
implications (Prescriptive Analytics). Prescriptive analytics
is suggesting actions to benefit from the predictions and showing the
implications of each decision option. Prescriptive Analytics defines a set of
analytical capabilities that include:
- Define a preferred course of action
- By calculating expected outcomes of alternative decision
options
Additionally,
statistics combines analytics with a decision engine, that enables direct integration of domain
knowledge into modeling, enables conclusions from models in terms of
prescriptions, usually referenced as prescriptive analytics. You may create a model to predict when assets or machinery may
fail and need preventive maintenance. Prescriptive analytics will provide you
with the optimal order in which the work orders need to be serviced within the
budget, time and other constraints.
In any advanced analytics scenario, thinking and intuition will always
be required. In fact thinking is inevitable! To do both predictive and
prescriptive analytics, you have to ask questions whose answers are potentially
actionable. And keep in mind, analytics is not the big ANSWER looking for the
business problems, instead, how to frame the right question is the key.
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