What is analytics? The difference between descriptive and predictive analytics?
Analytics is the analysis of data using different statistical and business intelligence tools to draw hidden insights that can help us for decision making processes at different levels such operational, tactical and strategic decisions. And it is an integral part of every businesses.
Operational decision making process are daily operational works with short-term effects and mainly are a structured decisions done by lower management.
Tactical decisions are decisions that are semi-structured and taken by middle management.
Strategic decisions are decisions that are mostly unstructured and taken by top management.
There are three types of analytics:
- Descriptive analytics
- Predictive analytics
- Prescriptive analytics
The descriptive analytics tool enables us to know information about the past using historical data
whereas Predictive analytics tool predicts what will happen in the future by identifying patterns in the historical data using statistics and machine learning techniques.
And Prescriptive analytics recommends decisions using optimization, simulation and so on. Besides, it also includes predictive and descriptive analytics.