Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive analytics use available data to offer the best course of action for any given scenario. Prescriptive analytics stress actionable insights over data monitoring.

Descriptive analytics offers BI insights into what has happened, and predictive analytics focuses on forecasting possible outcomes, prescriptive analytics aims to find the best solution given a variety of choices. Additionally, the field also empowers companies to make decisions based on optimizing the result of future events or risks, and provides a model to study them.

Prescriptive analytics gathers data from a variety of both descriptive and predictive sources for its models and applies them to the process of decision-making. This includes combining existing conditions and considering the consequences of each decision to determine how the future would be impacted. Moreover, it can measure the repercussions of a decision based on different possible future scenarios.

The field borrows heavily from mathematics and computer science, using a variety of statistical methods. The process creates and re-creates possible decision patterns that could affect an organization in different ways. Prescriptive analytics is the final step of business analytics.