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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2792–2793Cite as

Prescriptive Analytics

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Synonyms

Prescriptive business intelligence; Third phase of business analytics

Definition

Prescriptive analytics is the third and final stage of business analytics dedicated to finding and suggesting (i.e., prescribing) the best decision options for a given situation. Prescriptive analytics encompasses the activities of (1) data collection and consolidation, (2) information extraction, (3) forecasting, (4) optimization, (5) visualization, and (6) what-if analysis for first making predictions and then, based on these predictions, (a) suggesting the most appropriate time-dependent decisions (i.e., prescriptions) and (b) illustrating the implications of each decision option.

Descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics are the three stages of business analytics [1], characterized by different levels of difficulty, value, and intelligence (see Fig. 1).

Prescriptive Analytics, Fig. 1
figure 1641 figure 1641

Three stages of business analytics (Source “Gartner Inc.”)

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Recommended Reading

  1. Holsapple C, Post AL, Pakath R. A unified foundation for business analytics. Decis Support Syst. 2014;64:130–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Haas PJ, Maglio PP, Selinger PG, Tan WC. Data is dead… without what-if models. PVLDB. 2011;4(12):1486–9.

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  3. Basu A. Five pillars of prescriptive analytics success. Analytics Magazine; 2013. p. 812.

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  4. Šikšnys L, Pedersen TB, Solve DB. Integrating Optimization Problem Solvers Into SQL Databases. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management; 2016.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Laurynas Šikšnys & Torben Bach Pedersen

Authors
  1. Laurynas Šikšnys
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  2. Torben Bach Pedersen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laurynas Šikšnys .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Torben Bach Pedersen

  2. DISI, Univ. of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Rizzi

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Šikšnys, L., Pedersen, T.B. (2018). Prescriptive Analytics. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80624

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