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Thursday, January 15, 2009

Predictive Analytics

I have played in the space of analytic modeling for thirty years. It surprised me about five years ago when I was approached by people saying that they planned to start doing predictive analytics. I was confused. From my perspective, all analytics are predictive ... it is just a matter of how accurate the prediction might be. On one end of the scale, a model is descriptive ... at the other end it attempts to become very precise ... it can be called forecasting.

If you can be accurate depends on many factors. What data exists, how clean the data is, are there existing models that work, how stable is the context of the use of the model, what decisions will be influenced and who will be using the model.

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