About this Book

The desire to know the unknown has always been one of the human characteristics that distinguish humans from other living things on the earth. The past is known but cannot be changed, and hence is if no interest. The present is happening and everyone is witnessing it and therefore it is not exciting. But the future is both unknown and perhaps therefore uncertain, and is therefore both interesting and exciting. Using past experience for predicting the unknown future was initially treated as an art because it require careful choice of parts of the past that will make prediction both easy and accurate, and there were times when it was felt that it is impossible to formulate a method for this. Prediction was then not considered to be scientific empirical sciences that learn from scientist and professionals realized the scientific nature of the ability to predict. What then began as the preparation for developing a prediction formula involved finding common patterns in past data and their consequences so that the consequence can be predicted as soon as the relevant pattern is observed. At the same time the discipline of statistics developed the concept and methodology for building statistical models. With experience in the development and applications of different models, scientists and researchers identify models as belonging to four different classes namely, the class of descriptive models, the class of diagnostic models, the class of predictive models, and the class of prescriptive or prognostic models. The scientific or theoretical activity of building models and analyzing data accordingly is known as analytics. It has therefore been recognized that there are four classes of analytics, namely descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, prescriptive analytics and predictive analytics. These four classes are defined briefly for convenience of the reader.