Using business analytics to identify trends and predict business outcomes is not new, but it is getting some new attention. This interesting topic came to us from Reseller News in their article, “The art of using data to predict business outcomes.”
Business analytics are solutions used to build analysis models and simulations to create scenarios, understand realities and predict future states. In the family is also data analytics, used across disciplines to find trends and solve problems using data mining, data cleansing, data transformation, data modeling and more.
The area that provides the insight into the future is predictive analytics – the use of techniques such as statistical modeling, forecasting and machine learning to make predictions about future outcomes.
Think of it like the meteorologists forecasting the weather based on data and trends. Predictive business analytics use a variety of statistical techniques to create predictive models that extract information from datasets, identify patterns and provide a predictive score for an array of organizational outcomes. In other words, is it going to snow or is the sun shining on the business?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
