Introduction – What is Predictive Analytics
Predictive Analytics is basically a practice of using data to predict future outcomes and make better decisions. In today’s ever-evolving business landscape, data has become the driving force behind informed decision-making and strategic planning. Companies now seek to leverage predictive analytics to gain insights into the future. Predictive Analytics has unfolded as a powerful tool within the realm of reporting and analytics, enabling businesses to make accurate forecasts, identify trends and make data-driven decisions. Predictive Analytics is an advanced analytical technique that utilises historical data, statistical models and machine learning algorithms to make predictions about the future outcomes. By analysing patterns and relationships within vast datasets, organisations can uncover valuable insights and forecast potential scenarios with a higher degree of accuracy.
In this blog post, we will explore the fascinating world of predictive analytics and its profound impact on reporting and analytics. We will delve into the methodologies, techniques and tools that enable organisations to harness the power of predictive analytics. By understanding these concepts, we will gain a solid foundation to leverage the potential of predictive analytics in our organisation. The relevance of predictive analytics in the corporate world cannot be overstated. Businesses can make proactive decisions through identifying emerging trends, mitigating risks and maximising opportunities that drive growth and success. Predictive Analytics can provide you with the information necessary to strategize and make impactful business decisions.
Whether you are a business leader, data analyst or reporting professional predictive analytics will empower you to make data-driven decisions and unlock the full potential of your organisation’s data assets. Together, let’s explore how this transformative discipline can propel your organisation forward, enabling you to stay ahead of the curve and make informed decisions that drive success.
Why Predictive Analytics Matter
Strategic Planning and Forecasting
Analytics expert Donald Farmer explains that having access to more or better data is no longer a key differentiator. Instead, the ability to understand and act on data is what drives meaningful business outcomes. This is where predictive analytics plays a pivotal role by identifying significant patterns within the accumulated data, organisations can develop models that predict future events and behaviours. For instance, using historical customer data and similar customer profiles, predictive analytics can determine the likelihood of a customer’s response to a specific marketing offer or the probability of payment default. Application of predictive analytics has expanded across various business functions and industries. Organisations Strategically utilise predictive analytics to improve key performance metrics, mitigate risks, optimise operations, enhance efficiency and gain competitive edge.
Predictive Analytics holds immense value for commercial businesses, offering a wide range of benefits that can directly impact their success.
- Improved Risk Management: With predictive analytics, you gain the ability to accurately forecast customer preferences and behaviours. This helps you avoid investing resources in products or services that may not resonate with our target audience, reducing the risk of financial loss.
- Enhanced Efficiency and Cost Savings: By leveraging predictive analytics, you can streamline your operations and allocate resources more efficiently. This means making informed decisions, avoiding unnecessary purchases or sales calls, and optimising overall business performance, resulting in significant time and cost savings.
- Proactive Issue Resolution: Predictive analytics empowers you to detect and address potential problems before they escalate. Whether it’s identifying employee attrition risks or anticipating maintenance needs, you can take proactive measures to mitigate issues, minimising disruptions and costly mistakes.
- Targeted Marketing Strategies: Understanding when your customers are most likely to make purchasing decisions is a game-changer for your marketing efforts. By leveraging predictive analytics, you can optimise your campaigns, ensuring that your messages reach the right audience at the right time, ultimately saving on marketing expenses while maximising conversions.
- Talent Acquisition and Retention: Hiring the right employees is crucial for the success of any organisation. Predictive analytics enables you to predict the likelihood of job success for potential candidates, helping you make informed hiring decisions. Additionally, by identifying employees who may be at risk of leaving, you can take proactive measures to engage and retain valuable talent.
- Customer Churn Prevention: Anticipating customer churn is vital for maintaining a strong customer base. Predictive analytics allows you to identify patterns and signals that indicate customers are likely to disengage. Armed with this knowledge, you can implement targeted retention strategies, reaching out to at-risk customers and improving customer loyalty.
- Optimal Resource Planning: Predictive analytics enables you to forecast resource requirements accurately. Whether it’s scheduling routine maintenance tasks or managing inventory levels, you can optimise resource allocation, avoiding unnecessary expenses and ensuring smooth operations.
Predictive Analytics Using Power BI
Maximise Business Potential with Power BI
Power BI Predictive Analytics: Power BI’s AutoML feature automates the data science process involved in creating machine learning models. This empowers business analysts, data professionals, and developers without extensive data science knowledge to build accurate predictive models effortlessly. Power BI’s AI visualisations effectively highlight the crucial factors within your data inputs that significantly influence the predictions generated by your model. Furthermore, the predictive insights gained from Power BI can be seamlessly integrated into your existing business processes, enabling actionable decision-making. Below is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide outlining the process. Utilising Power BI data ingestion and refresh capabilities requires a premium Power BI workspace.
Step 01: Prepare the Data
Dataflows in Power BI unify and prepare data from multiple sources for analysis
- To begin, you can either create a new app workspace or navigate to an existing one within Power BI.
- Next, you need to create a Dataflow and establish a connection with the desired entity or data source.
Step 02: Perform model training, evaluation and application
- Set up the preferred prediction and machine learning model configuration.
Access the recently created dataflow and go to the machine learning section. Initiate the process by clicking on the “Get Started” button to apply the most suitable machine learning model. Power BI utilises supervised machine learning, where the models learn from previously observed outcomes to predict future outcomes.
Within Power BI, three types of machine learning models are utilised, and the selection depends on the data type of the intended prediction.
- Binary Prediction Model
- Classification Model
- Regression Model
Sales Forecasting
By understanding these distinct types of machine learning models in Power BI, businesses can effectively apply the most appropriate model based on their data and desired predictions.
- Perform data refreshing and training
The historical data provided in Power BI is divided into training and testing datasets. In certain instances, the generated model may utilise ensemble learning, employing multiple models to enhance predictive accuracy.
- Assess the performance of machine learning model
The AutoML feature in Power BI produces a comprehensive report that presents the model’s validation performance and highlights the global feature importance. By examining this report, you can evaluate the model’s performance and verify that the significant influencers identified align with the business insights related to the known outcomes.
- Generate predictions by applying AutoML model to your data.
When satisfied with ML model’s performance, you can apply it to update data during data flow refresh. Clicking the Apply button in the model report creates an “enriched” dataflow entity for visualisations.
Step 03: Implement and act upon the generated insights
- Leverage the AI visualisations in Power BI to uncover valuable insights, such as the key influencers feature.
By utilising the key influencers visual in Power BI, you can analyse the significant factors impacting your metric of interest. It provides valuable insights into the influence of different data fields on the predicted value, enabling business decision-makers to identify areas for process improvements, such as understanding the drivers of customer churn.
- Integrate the insights into your business workflows for actionable outcomes.
Seamlessly integrate Power BI reports and dashboards into your business applications such as dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, and PowerApps. Enabling direct access and actionable implementation of predictive insights within the relevant business context.
Productivity Enhancements
Innovative Solutions
Incorporating predictive data analytics into your daily business operations and leveraging it to foresee future events can yield substantial and tangible advantages for organisations across various industries and sizes.
- Anticipating Future Events
One of the most evident advantages of utilising predictive analytics in business is its capacity to provide insights into future outcomes and facilitate proactive planning in various areas such as inventory, workforce management and customer behaviour. By leveraging predictive technologies, you can gain valuable foresight enabling you to prepare in advance and optimise resource allocation based on anticipated trends and patterns.
- Improved Productivity and Efficiency
Organisations have the opportunity to delegate low-risk, routine decision-making tasks to predictive technologies, enabling human resources to focus on higher value strategic endeavours or tasks with greater risk implications.
Automated credit assessment and claims processing are among the tasks that can be effectively performed by predictive analytics. In the healthcare sector, predictive analytics aids in determining the potential success of new treatments, identifying suitable patients and forecasting trial outcomes based on historical data.
- Forecasting and Mitigating Risks
Through analysing historical operational data, predictive analytics models have the ability to identify emerging risk, their root causes and their probability of occurrence. Armed with this information, organisations can proactively develop risk management strategies and crisis response plans, ensuring preparedness for potential threats in advance.
Future-focused Analytics Classifications
Types of Predictive Analytics
There are four categories of analytics that follow a logical progression from understanding past events (Descriptive), Examining historical data to determine the root causes behind specific outcomes (Diagnostic), Predicting Future Events (Predictive), to recommending actions to optimise outcomes (Prescriptive). They altogether help businesses obtain valuable insights and make well informed decisions.
- Descriptive Analytics
This focuses on understanding historical data to gain insights into past events and trends. Descriptive analytics provides a retrospective view of data and helps understanding patterns, correlations and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
- Diagnostic Analytics
Organisations benefit from the insights provided by explanatory analysis, which helps them grasp the underlying reasons behind observed patterns. This enhanced understanding empowers them to make informed decisions and develop effective predictive use cases.
- Predictive Analytics
Predictive Analytics uses historical data and statistical modelling techniques to forecast future events or outcomes. It analyses past data to identify patterns and relationships then applying these insights to make predictions about what is likely to happen in future.
- Prescriptive Analytics
This goes beyond predicting future outcomes and focuses on providing recommendations or actions to optimise decision making. It combines historical data, predictive models and optimisation algorithms to suggest the best course of action in various scenarios. Prescriptive analytics helps organisations determine the most effective actions to achieve desired outcomes considering constraints, objectives and available resources.
Conclusion
Predictive Analytics serves as a powerful tool for organisations seeking to unlock valuable insights from their data. By capitalising advanced algorithms and historical patterns, businesses can forecast future events, identify patterns and make proactive adjustments. The application of Predictive Analytics spans across industries empowering businesses to enhance operational efficiency, mitigate risks, improve customer experiences and gain a competitive edge. This ability to uncover hidden opportunities and mitigate potential challenges, predictive analytics stands at the forefront of driving innovation and driving success in the dynamic landscape of today’s business world. By embracing this transformative technology organisations can pave the way for data-driven strategies ensuring sustainable growth and maximising their potential for success.
Author
Sikandar Sadiq
Associate Consultant