Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, 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.

Predictive analytics is a set of business intelligence (BI) technologies that uncovers relationships and patterns within large volumes of data that can be used to predict behavior and events. Unlike other BI technologies, predictive analytics is forward-looking, using past events to anticipate the future. Predictive analytics statistical techniques include data modeling, machine learning, AI, deep learning algorithms and data mining. Often the unknown event of interest is in the future, but predictive analytics can be applied to any type of unknown whether it be in the past, present or future. For example, identifying suspects after a crime has been committed, or credit card fraud as it occurs. The core of predictive analytics relies on capturing relationships between explanatory variables and the predicted variables from past occurrences, and exploiting them to predict the unknown outcome. It is important to note, however, that the accuracy and usability of results will depend greatly on the level of data analysis and the quality of assumptions.

The approaches and techniques used to conduct predictive analytics can broadly be grouped into regression techniques and machine learning techniques.

Machine learning can be defined as the ability of a machine to learn and then mimic human behavior that requires intelligence. This is accomplished through artificial intelligence, algorithms, and models.

ARIMA models are a common example of time series models. These models use autoregression, which means the model can be fitted with a regression software that will use machine learning to do most of the regression analysis and smoothing. ARIMA models are known to have no overall trend, but instead have a variation around the average that has a constant amplitude, resulting in statistically similar time patterns. Through this, variables are analyzed and data is filtered in order to better understand and predict future values.

One example of an ARIMA method is exponential smoothing models. Exponential smoothing takes into account the difference in importance between older and newer data sets, as the more recent data is more accurate and valuable in predicting future values. In order to accomplish this, exponents are utilized to give newer data sets a larger weight in the calculations than the older sets.