Predictive analytics uses analytical and statistical methods to predict future outcomes, actions, or behaviors. For businesses, it can enhance decision-making, improve competitiveness, find new business opportunities, reduce risks, and more.
Today, predictive analytics has become a reality for businesses looking for a competitive advantage in a global economy. It is made possible by collecting data from various sources, determining relationships based on past data points, and using those relationships to forecast future outcomes.
Predictive analytics is used for:
- Customer analysis – Get a better understanding of a customer’s future behavior by collecting digital marketing information from social media, enterprise and mobile apps, customer service, customer history, and other sources.
- Sales forecasting – Obtain a better grasp of your sales pipeline using current opportunities and leads combined with predictive analytics to predict future bookings.
- Fraud detection – Quickly identify fraudulent transactions and reduce the number of false insurance claims.
- Optimize marketing – Apply models to predict how campaigns will fare based on customer profile data, behaviors, and preferences.
Many business users understand the questions they need answered. However, many lack the skill to create data models—hence the need for an analytics tool that guides business professionals through the process of creating visualizations and analyzing data in order to make better decisions.
Businesses typically have data in:
- Relational databases
- Flat files
- Spreadsheets
- Unstructured data (i.e. social media and email)
- Structured SQL databases
- Data from third-party vendors, and much more
All of this data needs to be accessed in order to allow for exploratory data analysis (EDA). Using data discovery tools like TIBCO Spotfire, users are self-sufficient and empowered to better understand their data by exploring it visually—without requesting assistance from IT or data scientists. When you combine data discovery with predictive analytics software, it creates a seamless analytics experience.
Using the right solution, predictive analytics becomes a reality for users of all experience levels, from beginners to data scientists. It allows decision makers to derive insights from data while improving the value of your data.
