Predictive Analytics World for Business

Predictive analytics optimizes marketing campaigns and website behavior to increase customer responses, conversions and clicks, and to decrease churn. Each customer’s predictive score informs actions to be taken with that customer — business intelligence just doesn’t get more actionable than that.

Predictive analytics is business intelligence technology that produces a predictive score for each customer or other organizational element. Assigning these predictive scores is the job of a predictive model which has, in turn, been trained over your data, learning from the experience of your organization.

Predictive Analytics World London often include select sessions on forecasting since it is a closely related area, and, in some cases, predictive analytics is used as a component to build a forecast model.
However, Predictive analytics is something else entirely, going beyond standard forecasting by producing a predictive score for each customer or other organizational element. In contrast, forecasting provides overall aggregate estimates, such as the total number of purchases next quarter. For example, forecasting might estimate the total number of ice cream cones to be purchased in a certain region, while predictive analytics tells you which individual customers are likely to buy an ice cream cone.

Yes. Predictive analytics means the commercial deployment of machine learning (the two terms are often used synonymously). Although the term “machine learning” used to be common only within the walls of research labs, it’s now also used more and more in the context of commercial deployment. Whichever term you prefer, we are discussing technology that learns from data to predict or infer an unknown, including decision trees, logistic regression, neural networks, and many other methods.

Yes. Data mining is often used synonymously with predictive analytics, and, in any case, predictive analytics is a type of data mining.

Yes. Predictive analytics is a form of data science. Moreover, it is the most actionable form. A predictive model generates a predictive score for each individual, which in turn directly informs decisions for that individual, e.g., whether to contact, extend a retention offer, approve for credit, investigate for fraud, or apply a certain medical treatment. Rather than solely providing insights, predictive analytics directly drives or informs millions of operational decisions.