The Benefits of Predictive Analytics
Wouldn’t we all like to grab a crystal ball and forecast what events will happen in our future? I know I would! By visualising the events of my future, I’d be able to better prepare for them now – that’s the idea behind predictive analytics.
By predicting what will happen to our business, our customers, or our competitors in the future we can make proactive changes to our strategy and business operations now to be ahead of the curve.
Sounds good, but also sounds complicated…
“Where do we start, how do we build this analysis, and how do we even begin to use it?” I hear people exclaim.
Well, before even considering making use of predictive analytics, you must have your data structured and maintained to a high quality. Rubbish in, rubbish out as they say (perhaps you may have heard of the cruder version…).
Translating error-prone, manual-based processes into automated processes is a must before venturing into predictive analytics. Having clean, concise, and most importantly, trustworthy data will ensure that your efforts are not wasted.
You see, spearheading a change within your business, such as setting up predictive analytics, is hard and you’ll most likely come across blockers who are averse to change. If you were to rush ahead and launch a predictive analytics project without first tending to your error-prone manual processes which supply data to these predictive models, then the potentially misleading results of the analysis will only give those blockers the reason they wanted to kick up a fuss and shut down the project.
Make your processes water-tight with tools such as Alteryx, which can automatically, and repeatably clean, transform, and load data to ensure that you’re ready to get started on your predictive journey.
Considering that’s sorted, how do you start with predictive analytics?
There are many tools out there on the market that can do the job. Be careful when selecting your toolset as some require specialist coding knowledge to be able to use effectively.
For example, you can build all of your own custom-made predictive models in coding languages such as R or Python. Even though the benefit of using these coding languages is that you can fine-tune and customize your predictive models to your heart’s content, it does require you to have highly skilled programmers in-house or use expensive third-party consultants to build and maintain them.
Here at Continuum, we see a future that is code-free! Therefore, all our favoured tools do not require any coding whatsoever and still give you gold-standard, professional predictions on your data – one such tool that we partner with, Data Robot, is even used by the Maclaren Formula 1 racing team to help them predict what effect a change they make to their cars will have on the track!
Our favourite, code-free, predictive analytic tools are…
Whatever tool you choose, there’s likely to be a phase of building, training, and testing your predictive models to make sure you get the most accurate results.
Our friends down at Tangent Works have revolutionised the game by introducing “Real-time Instant Machine Learning”. With Real-time instant machine learning, Tangent Works automates everything from model building to model application, taking input data and directly providing the user with the relevant forecast.
What this means is that Tangent Works makes predictive forecasting available for everyone, with no data science knowledge needed! Just pick up and play.
