Prescriptive analytics is the area of business analytics (BA) dedicated to finding the best course of action for a given situation.
Prescriptive analytics is
related to both descriptive and predictive analytics. While descriptive
analytics aims to provide insight into what has happened and predictive
analytics helps model and forecast what might happen, prescriptive analytics
seeks to determine the best solution or outcome among various choices, given
the known parameters.
Prescriptive
analytics can also suggest decision options for how to take advantage of a
future opportunity or mitigate a future risk, and illustrate the implications
of each decision option. In practice, prescriptive analytics can continually
and automatically process new data to improve the accuracy of predictions and provide
better decision options.
A
process-intensive task, the prescriptive approach analyzes potential decisions,
the interactions between decisions, the influences that bear upon these
decisions and the bearing all of the above has on an outcome to ultimately
prescribe an optimal course of action in real time. Prescriptive analytics is
not failproof, however, but is subject to the same distortions that can upend
descriptive and predictive analytics, including data limitations and
unaccounted-for external forces. The effectiveness of predictive analytics also
depends on how well the decision model captures the impact of the decisions
being analyzed.
Advancements
in the speed of computing and the development of complex mathematical algorithms applied
to the data sets have made prescriptive analysis possible. Specific
techniques used in prescriptive analytics include optimization, simulation, game
theory and decision-analysis methods.
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