Prescriptive Analytics for Business
Business analytics comes in threegeneral flavors: descriptive, predictive and prescriptive. ------ Predictive, Descriptive, Prescriptive Analytics.------ Put simply, descriptive analytics describes the past and predictive analytics provides a probability of what might happen. In contrast, prescriptive analytics helps an organization evaluate different scenarios and seeks to determine the best course of action to achieve optimal outcomes - given known and estimating unknown variables . Increased compute speed, decreased data storage costs and recent development of complex algorithms applied to diverse data sources and larger data sets has made prescriptive analysis feasible and affordable for most organizations. Scientific techniques include data science (e.g., machine learning, algorithms, artificial intelligence, bayesian probability, monte carlo simulations...etc.), game theory, optimization, simulations, and decision-analysis methods. ...