Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Living Edition
| Editors: Ling Liu, M. Tamer Özsu

Prescriptive Analytics

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_80624-1
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Synonyms

Prescriptive business intelligence; Third phase of business analytics

Definition

Prescriptive analytics isthe 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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Recommended Reading

  1. 1.
    Holsapple C, Post AL, Pakath R. A unified foundation for business analytics. DSS. 2014.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Haas PJ, Maglio PP, Selinger PG, Tan WC. Data is dead… without what-if models. PVLDB. 2011;4(12):1486–9.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Basu A. Five pillars of prescriptive analytics success. Analytics. 2013; 812.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Šikšnys L, Pedersen TB, Solve DB. Integrating Optimization Problem Solvers Into SQL Databases. In Proc. of SSDBM, 2016.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media LLC 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Computer ScienceAalborg UniversityAalborgDenmark