Synonyms
Prescriptive business intelligence; Third phase of business analytics
Definition
Prescriptive analytics is the third and final stage of business analytics dedicated to finding and suggesting (i.e., prescribing) the best decision options for a given situation. Prescriptive analytics encompasses the activities of (1) data collection and consolidation, (2) information extraction, (3) forecasting, (4) optimization, (5) visualization, and (6) what-if analysis for first making predictions and then, based on these predictions, (a) suggesting the most appropriate time-dependent decisions (i.e., prescriptions) and (b) illustrating the implications of each decision option.
Descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics are the three stages of business analytics [1], characterized by different levels of difficulty, value, and intelligence (see Fig. 1).
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Holsapple C, Post AL, Pakath R. A unified foundation for business analytics. Decis Support Syst. 2014;64:130–41.
Haas PJ, Maglio PP, Selinger PG, Tan WC. Data is dead… without what-if models. PVLDB. 2011;4(12):1486–9.
Basu A. Five pillars of prescriptive analytics success. Analytics Magazine; 2013. p. 812.
Šikšnys L, Pedersen TB, Solve DB. Integrating Optimization Problem Solvers Into SQL Databases. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management; 2016.
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Šikšnys, L., Pedersen, T.B. (2018). Prescriptive Analytics. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80624
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80624
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