We had already discussed a fair bit about predictive analytics in the previous chapter to give you a general overview of what it means. We will be discussing it in more detail in this section. Predictive analytics can be defined as a subset of the machine learning universe, which encompasses a wide variety of supervised learning algorithms based on data science, statistics, and mathematical formulae which enable us to build predictive models using these algorithms and data which has already been collected. These models enable us to make predictions of what might happen in the future based on past observations. Combining this with domain knowledge, expertise, and business logic enables analysts to make data driven decisions using these predictions, which is the ultimate outcome of predictive analytics.
The data we are talking about here is data which has already been observed in the past and has been collected over a period of time for analysis. This data is often known...