Predictive Analytics Guide

Predictive analytics is business intelligence technology that produces a predictive score for each customer or other organizational element. Assigning these predictive scores is the job of a predictive model which has, in turn, been trained over your data, learning from the experience of your organization.

Predictive analytics optimizes marketing campaigns and website behavior to increase customer responses, conversions and clicks, and to decrease churn. Each customer's predictive score informs actions to be taken with that customer — business intelligence just doesn't get more actionable than that.

What's the best way to learn about predictive analytics? There's no better way to learn than from concrete case studies such as those presented by Fortune 500 analytics competitors and other top practitioners at the next Predictive Analytics World. In the meanwhile, start by taking a look through the resources listed below on this page.

Tutorial Articles

The following short, published articles, written by the conference chair, are a great place to get started.

• Predictive Analytics with Data Mining: How It Works
  Get a handle on the functional value of predictive analytics for marketing, sales and product direction. DM Review's DM Direct

• Seven Reasons You Need Predictive Analytics Today
  Predictive analytics has come of age as a core enterprise practice necessary to sustain competitive advantage. This definitive white paper, sponsored by IBM, reveals seven strategic objectives that can be attained to their full potential only by employing predictive analytics, namely Compete, Grow, Enforce, Improve, Satisfy, Learn, and Act.

• Driven with Business Expertise, Analytics Produces Actionable Predictions
  Run data mining as a business activity to generate customer predictions that will have a business impact. CRM Magazine's DestinationCRM.

• Six Ways to Lower Costs with Predictive Analytics
  This article delivers six ways predictive analytics lowers costs without decreasing business, thus transforming your enterprise into a Lean, Mean Analytical Machine. Example brand-name case study results are provided along the way. From BeyeNETWORK.

• Predictive Analytics Delivers Value Across Business Applications

• Predictive Analytics' Killer App: Retaining New Customers

Advanced Topics

• Uplift Modeling: Predictive Analytics Can’t Optimize Marketing Decisions Without It
  To drive business decisions for maximal impact, analytical models must predict the marketing influence of each decision on customer buying behavior. Uplift modeling provides the means to do this, improving upon conventional response and churn models that introduce significant risk by optimizing for the wrong thing. This shift is fundamental to empirically driven decision making. This convention-altering white paper, reveals the why and how, and delivers case study results that multiply the ROI of predictive analytics by factors up to 11.

  
  
  

Predictive Analytics Training

For more extensive learning, attend Predictive Analytics World's official training seminar or view the online e-course on predictive analytics, available on-demand at any time. Training participants earn a hefty discount off Predictive Analytics World registration, amounting to up to half off the training.

Predictive Analytics World Conference

Predictive Analytics World is the leading event for predictive analytics consumers, managers and commercial practitioners. This conference delivers case studies, expertise and resources over a range of business applications of predictive analytics. For more on this conference's scope, see About Predictive Analytics World.

Predictive Analytics World for Government is the predictive analytics conference for the government, designed to help agency managers understand how they can apply predictive analytics to more effectively and efficiently accomplish their mission. For more on this conference's scope, see About Predictive Analytics World for Government.

Text Analytics World Conference

Text Analytics World is the business event for text analytics consumers, managers and commercial practitioners. This conference delivers case studies, expertise and resources over a range of business applications of text analytics. For more on this conference's scope, see About Text Analytics World.

Predictive Analytics Newsletters

Subscribe to Prediction Impact's bi-annual email newsletter: Case studies, articles, events. Or view previous newsletters.

www.KDnuggets.com: A comprehensive online portal and newsletter for data mining, including predictive analytics.

Subscribe to Predictive Analytics World event notifications and announcements.

Webcasts – Archived and On-Demand

View informative webcasts on-demand now, at no charge.

Survey Results on Predictive Analytics

Business applications: Predictive Analytics World Survey on Business Applications (PDF file). Commercial deployments, trends, verticals, and the ROI's achieved.

Analytical practitioners: Rexer Analytics Data Miner Survey. An extensive survey of data mining and predictive analytics professionals, reporting data miner needs, preferences and views, and the most popular software tools.

Case Studies

A successful information portal in the educational sector, used by 1 in 3 college-bound high school seniors, increased advertisement response to the tune of $1 million – read the full case study here.

For more case studies, see the fourth and fifth interview questions below.

Predictive Analytics Informative Interviews

Read succinct interviews with Predictive Analytics World chair Eric Siegel, Ph.D. that provide an overview of predictive analytics. Answers to the following questions are provided:

• What is predictive analytics and what does it accomplish?
• What kind of investment in infrastructure is required?
• How do companies benefit from predictive analytics?
• Could you provide an example case of deploying predictive analytics?
• Could you describe a specific client deployment for Predictive Analytics?
• What are the risks when deploying predictive analytics; how often does it fail?

FAQ: Predictive Analytics World

Read succinct interviews with Predictive Analytics World chair Eric Siegel, Ph.D. that provide an overview of predictive analytics. Answers to the following questions are provided:

• How is predictive analytics different from forecasting?
• Who is Predictive Analytics World for?
• What will I learn at Predictive Analytics World?
• Is Predictive Analtyics World a “data mining” conference?
• More questions…