Big Data Analytics and Data Science

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modelling, and machine learning, that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.In business, predictive models exploit patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify risks and opportunities. Models capture relationships among many factors to allow assessment of risk or potential associated with a particular set of conditions, guiding decision-making for candidate transactions. The defining functional effect of these technical approaches is that predictive analytics provides a predictive score (probability) for each individual (customer, employee, healthcare patient, product SKU, vehicle, component, machine, or other organizational unit) in order to determine, inform, or influence organizational processes that pertain across large numbers of individuals, such as in marketing, credit risk assessment, fraud detection, manufacturing, healthcare, and government operations including law enforcement.

Data-driven Analytics and Business Management:

In business, you constantly have to make decisions — from how much raw material to order to how to optimize retail traffic for changing weather. In days gone by, you might have consulted the person who had been around the longest for their best guess; for a more scientific approach, you might have also looked at sales records. Today, companies are finding that the best answers to these questions come from another source entirely: large amounts of data and computer-driven analysis that you rigorously leverage to make predictions. This is called data-driven decision making (DDDM).