Analytics starts from simply understanding more about the data you are going to work with, such as how many variables are character versus numeric, and attributes related to the variables such as length, number of missing values, and number of unique values for any given column. Advanced analytics includes data mining, forecasting, and/or optimization. Data mining involves both descriptive analytics and predictive analytics, which can be used to segment entities into like groups, describing characteristics of groups and providing likelihood scores from 0 to 100% of an event or type of behavior for individual entities being analyzed. Forecasting tends to use a different set of mathematical algorithms to help determine the number of entities that will be needed within some future time range and/or when an event may occur in the future with a confidence rating between 0 to 100% on the results.
Optimization provides algorithms that help determine the maximum or minimum values of complex...