This era is experiencing a renaissance in business analytics when it comes to data science and technology. The trend started with descriptive analytics leading to investigative analytics, which ultimately led to predictive analytics to forecast future outcomes. The next leap from predictive analytics is Prescriptive Analytics, which along with predicting the outcomes also prescribes solutions that will yield the desired results.

How is prescriptive analytics different from the other forms of analytics?

Although we have been hearing buzzwords like Predictive Analytics and prescriptive analysis a lot more, in reality, about 80 percent of analytics work done across enterprises is descriptive. Descriptive analytics is meant for looking at the overall business trends to deduce what happened.
But prescriptive analytics happens to be an amalgamation of all three namely predictive, investigative and descriptive analytics, and it begins by answering questions like ‘so what’.

How can you employ the power of prescriptive analytics in 2020?

Although prescriptive analytics is still in its nascent stage, it can be used effectively across the following sectors:

• Healthcare

As there are multiple processes involved in healthcare, the healthcare applications of prescriptive analysis are far and wide. Prescriptive analytics can guide doctors to prescribe medicines based on only the medical history of the patient, as well as historical data collected from other patients about the same diseases and allergies. At the time when the healthcare industry is inclining towards a model based on value, analytics has been enhancing the value provided to the doctors, patients, clinics and other stakeholders.

• Crime analytics

This sector has been gaining a lot of attention lately due to the effectiveness it offers in detecting and preventing crimes. With several data points like crime location, date, type of conflict, surveillance information satellite images, and spatial data, prescriptive analytics can now feed historical crime data to generate possible outcomes. The first step is predicting the probability of the occurrence of crimes, then after referring to the historical data and real-time information, it offers ideas to prevent them altogether.

• E-commerce

In the context of using Artificial Intelligence, Amazon declared that in near future it would ship products even before the customer hits the buy button! Amazon is noted for using a blend of predictive and descriptive analytics to monitor current trends and previous buying patterns of customers to determine the probability of a certain customer buying a product. The system, after analyzing necessary data, suggests Amazon ship the product from the warehouse by giving the customer the expected delivery date. Once the customer actually places the order, the product reaches them almost instantly!

• Education

Prescriptive analytics is expected to influence the education sector positively. Since it generates large piles of data, experts believe that it can effectively suggest suitable courses to a student searching for relevant courses, by examining their marks and exploring their hobbies and interests.
As the field of AI and Machine Learning grows, so will be the world of prescriptive analytics. With the growing volume of data, companies can explore endless opportunities using advanced analytics tools and leveraging prescriptive analytics.