What is Business Analytics?
Business Analytics define as using tools and technique to turn data into meaningful business insights. Further, Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning
Types of Business Analytics
- Descriptive Analytics
The simplest way to define descriptive analytics is that, it answers the question “What has happened? or What is happening?” It tracks key performance indicators to understand the present state of a business.
Examples of Descriptive Analysis
-Summarizing past events such as regional sales, customer attrition, or success of marketing campaigns.
-Reporting of general trends like travel destinations for diwali vacations or summer vacations or news trends.
-Tabulation of social metrics such as face book likes, tweets, or followers.
- Predictive Analysis
Predictive analytics is used by businesses to study the data and create a crystal ball to find answers to the question “What could happen in the future based on previous trends and patterns?”
The purpose of predictive analytics is not to tell you what will happen in the future. Predictive analytics can forecast what might happen in the future, because all predictive analytics are probabilistic in nature.
Predictive analytics helps to forecast the likelihood of a future outcome by using various statistical and machine learning algorithms.
Uses of Predictive Analysis
-Optimizing marketing campaignsto determine customer responses to marketing campaigns or purchase patterns.
-Improving operations to better manage inventory and other resources or to set prices for services based on things like seasonality.
-Fraud detection. Analytics can monitor activity and note or catch unusual or out of the ordinary customer activity, often in real-time.
Reduce risk. Merchants, such as car dealers, use more than just a credit score now to determine whether to approve a loan. They also look at things like insurance claims and driving records to determine if the buyer is a risk.
- Perspective Analysis
The term prescriptive analytics was first coined by IBM and later trademarked by Ayata. Prescriptive Analytics takes Predictive Analytics a step further and takes the possible forecasted outcomes and predicts consequences for these outcomes. Prescriptive analytics use both structured and unstructured data.
Google’s self-driving car is a best example of prescriptive analytics. It analyzes the environment and decides the direction to take based on data.