Predictive Analytics: Can It Make Your Company More Successful?

 

Data mining is dead. So say the experts. They give many reasons for it--It died of too many unmet expectations, or that classic data mining is too much statistical analysis used to predict the past. Another reason they give is that it is an ambiguous term, and--as Forrester says--it overlaps with data profiling, data warehousing, OLAP and enterprise analytic applications.

The experts also say that data mining is being replaced by predictive analytics.

There are other experts who say that is a misinformed comment, that these two are just the same thing and that data mining should be the term to use, as it is a super-set that encompasses predictive analytics, too.

Whether you buy the first argument or the second (or a different variation), there is no denying the fact that predictive analytics has been slowly gaining ground and is being used in many applications like customer churn management, campaign optimization and fraud detection. Many firms are also using it for demand planning, just-in-time inventory management and market basket analysis etc.

What is Predictive Analytics?
Predictive analytics is a set of mathematical-oriented algorithms that sift through data and identify patterns and trends. In a sense they are more a predictor of the future rather than a review of the past.

It is related to data mining, though it is more sophisticated and comes with …

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