This will be the only conceptual chapter of the book; you may want to start coding and building predictive models from the start, but trust me, we need a common understanding of the fundamental concepts that we will use in the rest of the book. First, we will discuss in detail what predictive analytics is, then we will define some of the most important concepts of this exciting field. With those concepts as a foundation, we will go on to provide a quick overview of the stages in the predictive analytics process, and finally briefly talk about them, as we will devote entire chapters to each of them in the rest of the book.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- What is predictive analytics?
- A review of important concepts of predictive analytics
- The predictive analytics process
- A quick tour of Python's data science stack
