Types of Analytics: descriptive, predictive, prescriptive analytics

TYPES OF ANALYTICS

The process of discovering meaningful pattern or information from a set of data is called analytics. Another question we always hear is, what is the difference between data and information ? - Data can termed as the set of actions stored in a system like transactions and information is the inferences taken out from data with calculation e.g. quarterly sales of Maruti Suzuki car for 2019.

So the analytics can be for 4 types

• Descriptive
• Prescriptive
• predictive
• Inferential

Descriptive analytics

The descriptive analytics is vary simple process of data analysis like Sales By Location for the year 2019. It examines the historical data and gives you information like how was my sales in the year 2019 ? Which Locations had better sales ? Which products were sold and what was the amount.

Descriptive analytics is the interpretation of historical data to better understand changes that have occurred in a business.

Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive Analytics is the area of data analytics that focuses on finding the best course of action in a scenario given the available data. It emphasizes actionable insights instead of data monitoring like descriptive analytics. 

So basically here once we find that the business was not good in 2nd quarter of 2019, we start getting into details like which product, which days the issue was and we start doing root cause and course of correction to improve the situation.

Predictive Analytics

In predictive analytics we try to guess future by reading past data, for e.g. we have some credit card transactions in past and based on the past transaction we try to guess if we can see any fraudulent transaction in future or we can guess the future price of real estate by seeing the past behavior.

Inferential analytics

Inferential analysis are techniques that allow us to use these samples to make generalizations about the populations from which the samples were drawn. It is, therefore, important that the sample accurately represents the population. The most common example would be exit poll in India