Why you need to learn Prescriptive Analytics to make a successful career in data science

Shivam Agarwal
3 min readNov 21, 2022
Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

There are three types of analytics descriptive, predictive and prescriptive. While descriptive and predictive is in saturation phase. Organization are looking forward for predictive analytics

Analytics is providing extra edge to the companies. Companies are looking more and more towards the different analytics as a strategic investment. Analytics can be used in two different ways. Firstly to understand the past secondly to predict the future. Descriptive analytics is used to understand the past while predictive and prescriptive analytics is used for future.

  1. Descriptive Analytics:- This type of analytics is very simple. It is used to understand what has happened in the past. Every organization is using this in the form of reports. Ex. Company XYZ wants to track its sales growth from 2019 to 2022, it can use a simple bar graph to track the growth.

2. Predictive Analytics:- This analytics is little complicated and requires machine learning algorithm. In this we utilize the past data to predict what will happen in the future. Ex. Company XYZ wants to know the sales for year 2023 based on the sales data from 2019 to 2022.

3. Prescriptive Analytics:- There is a small difference between predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. While both provides the information about the future, prescriptive analytics also gives you the impact on the prediction if we change the important variables. Ex. Company XYZ wants to know the sales for year 2023 based on the sales data from 2019 to 2022 in two different scenarios. i) If the marketing expenditure remains same ii) if the marketing expenditure doubles

Why Prescriptive Analytics is the future:- With advance capabilities of analytics the organizations are more interested to know the future and also to tune the parameters in such a way so that they can maximize their revenue. Prescriptive analytics provide them the flexibility to know the future and to tune the parameters in such a way so that the desired outcome can be achieved.

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Shivam Agarwal

Shivam is an accomplished analytics professional and algo trader, sharing expertise in algo trading, data science, and AI through insightful publications.