In today’s world, data is so prevalent that we run the risk of drowning in it. How do you make sense of thousands of variables and data points?
The term “analytics” encompasses an entire realm of thought about processing data. There are multiple kinds of analytics, but all of them strive to gain some sort of understanding from data. Modern analytical methods tend to be lumped into four groups: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive.
As with many other scientific fields, most of which have their own evolution of analytics, business analytics began as descriptive, simply chronicling events that had happened. Descriptive analytics answer “what happened?” They help businesses generate narratives, supported by charts and tables, to further market products or development as a company. This type of analytics helps uncover the reasoning behind prior successes or failures and can be used to prevent future failures or encourage future successes.
Diagnostic analytics answer the question “why did something happen?” They use techniques such as data mining to go beyond the summaries provided by descriptive analytics in order to drill down into the root causes for phenomena that occurred. Diagnostic analytics are particularly useful for businesses that need to understand why a product failed.
Predictive analytics consider all known information about a given subject to make predictions about future events. The value of predicting future outcomes and planning for unknown events is obvious, but reaching these outcomes is far from straightforward. Taking into account all information about a given subject while considering the volume and variable types of data available to process and produce these outcomes is overwhelming.
While descriptive analytics chronicle events that have taken place and diagnostic analytics determine why those events have taken place, predictive analytics consider all known information about a given subject to make predictions about the future. Prescriptive analytics suggest how we might mitigate the effects of an event, how to determine what actions ought to be taken, and how actions influence future events.
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Whether structured or unstructured data, Katana Graph can greatly improve the insights and opportunities uncovered from your organization’s data. Click to schedule a meeting.
