Prescriptive analytics

Prescriptive analytics is a form of business analytics which suggests decision options for how to take advantage of a future opportunity or mitigate a future risk, and shows the implication of each decision option. It enables an enterprise to consider "the best course of action to take" in the light of information derived from descriptive and predictive analytics. Prescriptive analytics is the third and final phase of business analytics, which also includes descriptive and predictive analytics. Referred to as the "final frontier of analytic capabilities", prescriptive analytics entails the application of mathematical and computational sciences and suggests decision options for how to take advantage of the results of descriptive and predictive phases. The first stage of business analytics is descriptive analytics, which still accounts for the majority of all business analytics today. Descriptive analytics looks at past performance and understands that performance by mining historical data to look for the reasons behind past success or failure. Most management reporting – such as sales, marketing, operations, and finance – uses this type of post-mortem analysis. The next phase is predictive analytics. Predictive analytics answers the question of what is likely to happen. This is where historical data is combined with rules, algorithms, and occasionally external data to determine the probable future outcome of an event or the likelihood of a situation occurring. The final phase is prescriptive analytics, which goes beyond predicting future outcomes but also suggesting actions to benefit from the predictions and showing the implications of each decision option. Prescriptive analytics uses algorithms and machine learning models to simulate various scenarios and predict the likely outcomes of different decisions. It then suggests the best course of action based on the desired outcome and the constraints of the situation. Prescriptive analytics not only anticipates what will happen and when it will happen, but also why it will happen.