Higher Education · Data Science & Statistics
Predictive Analytics
What is it
Predictive analytics uses historical data and statistical or machine learning models to forecast future outcomes or unknown values, ranging from simple regression-based forecasts to complex ensemble machine learning models.
Why it matters
Predictive analytics drives an enormous range of real business and scientific decisions — from predicting customer churn to forecasting disease outbreaks — making it one of the most directly applied and commercially valuable areas of statistics and data science.
Exam tip
Always validate a predictive model on data it hasn't seen during training (a held-out test set) — a model that fits the training data extremely well but performs poorly on new data has overfit, and this validation step is the only reliable way to catch it.
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