“Analytics” defined
As of late, the word “analytics” has been stretched and applied to many areas. For our purposes, we describe analytics as a continuum having the following three characteristics. Presented in order of increasing complexity and sophistication:
- Descriptive – These are analytics that provide descriptions of data and phenomena represented by the data. People are generally familiar with descriptive analytics: averages, distributions, clusters, categories, and so on.
- Predictive – These are analytics that predict what could happen given certain conditions. The algorithms review past cases and learn, or they create examples that can be compared to current datasets to obtain a prediction of the probability of what might be (or will be) happening. These algorithms, which are less familiar to laypeople, include machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, cognitive computing, and so on.
- Prescriptive ...