Predictive Analytics vs Prescriptive Analytics in one picture

Predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics and the fairly recent offshoot-- discovery analytics-- can all support business decision making. Although the three tools are very similar in that they build off the same analytic foundation, the types of decisions they support are quite different. This one picture explains the differences between the three methods.

References

Predictive vs. Prescriptive Analytics: What’s the Difference?

Business Solutions & Big Data: Descriptive Analytics

Differences Between Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics

Self driving car image: Grendelkhan [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Tags: predictive analytics

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Comment by Eric Siegel on December 29, 2019 at 3:39am: Predictive analytics in most cases is already *meant* to inform case-by-case actions — driving a decision by way of each per-individual predictive score. That is to say, it is already by design “prescriptive,” and introducing the term “prescriptive analytics” implies there is something significant beyond that introduced. Certainly there may be non-analytical business rules and other such tactics that “wrap” a predictive model for its deployment, but I would not say that introduces an entirely new field or technology by any means. See: https://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/machinelearningtimes/presc...