Introduction to Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive analysis

Science and technology are developing at an unparalleled rate. The convergence of new treatments, diagnostics, wearables, sensors and connectivity is generating enormous amounts of data. As the amount of data available increased dramatically, so the motivation for different analytical approaches. In fact, more data available does not always mean more knowledge to be used in decisions, as we need automatic methods to exploit such data.

Analytical approaches can be defined in three categories, namely descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive:

• Descriptive analytics refers to summarization of datasets, making them interpretable to researchers.
• Predictive analytics approaches provide estimates of the likelihood of future events or outcomes - or are used to address gaps or missing information.
• Prescriptive analytics goes beyond

Figure 8 – Analytical approaches to process data. Image source available at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescriptive_analytics