Framework

Descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics

The question it answers

When a firm's leaders invest in data, which question should it answer for them: what happened, what will happen, or what should we do?

Origin
Lepenioti et al., 2020
Diagram type
Process by phase
Level of analysis
Firm
Topics
Data & analyticsAI for leaders
Magnifying lens over a line chart tile, icon for data and analytics

Diagram

Descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics

  1. Three types of analytics
  2. DescriptiveWhat happened? (reports, dashboards, KPIs)
  3. PredictiveWhat could happen? (forecasting models, machine learning)
  4. PrescriptiveWhat should we do? (decision tools, optimisation)

Sources

References

Listed A–Z by author surname, Harvard style. A source with a DOI links to https://doi.org/…; one without links to its page or says plainly that it has no DOI.

  1. Lepenioti, K. et al. (2020) ‘Prescriptive analytics: literature review and research challenges’, International Journal of Information Management, 50, pp. 57–70.doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.04.003Source page
  2. Wedel, M. and Kannan, P.K. (2016) ‘Marketing analytics for data-rich environments’, Journal of Marketing, 80(6), pp. 97–121.doi:10.1509/jm.15.0413Source page