Prescriptive analytics

Prescriptive analytics is the third and final phase of business analytics (BA) which includes descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Referred to as the "final frontier of analytic capabilities," Prescriptive analytics automatically synthesizes big data, multiple disciplines of mathematical sciences and computational sciences, and business rules, to make predictions and then suggests decision options to take advantage of the predictions. The first stage of business analytics is descriptive analytics, which still accounts for the majority of all business analytics today. Descriptive analytics answers the questions what happened and why did it happen. Descriptive analytics looks at past performance and understands that performance by mining historical data to look for the reasons behind past success or failure. Most management reporting - such as sales, marketing, operations, and finance - uses this type of post-mortem analysis.