Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. Around the world, companies across all industries are relying on this data to do everything from evaluating the success of their business to charting strategies for future growth.
Some of the most popular ways that various industries are using predictive analytics include:
- Retail: The U.S. e-commerce industry grew more than 40% in 2020. To help drive those sales, the industry relies heavily on predictive analytics — and we are all very familiar with the methods. For example, online retailers use predictive analytics to create personalized product recommendations for customers based on their past browsing and purchase history.
- Healthcare: The continued proliferation of wearable technologies is making predictive analytics more and more popular and useful in the massive healthcare industry. Physicians and scientists of various backgrounds predict everything from proactively providing patient care to predicting negative results of medications or other treatments.
- Entertainment: Netflix is the king of predictive analytics in the predictive analytics space to provide recommendations to viewers on what they should watch next based on what they’ve watched previously. Many viewers rely on these predictions and that is why they get so mad when someone else uses their account and messes up their algorithm.
- Cybersecurity: Securing our data and networks has become a massive undertaking for all organizations, across all locations and all industries. Predictive analytics are helping to should some burdens of this high-impact profession by helping to predict when and how an attack might happen. This technology analyzes typical fraud activity via predictive models to recognize patterns and alert security teams to any anomalies.
- Weather:This one shouldn’t be much of a surprise as the weather industry continues to look for ways to evolve its methods for predicting the weather to keep people as safe as possible when the worst weather threatens an area. Using predictive analytics, individuals in this industry can analyze weather patterns and satellite imagery to better predict what these weather patterns will look like.
If your company wants to optimize the benefits of predictive analytics but is worried you cannot manage the process, tools like predictive analytics power bi, can help you collect, organize, visualize, and breakdown data and analytics to find the real trends that will help to drive your business forward.