Predictive analytics is the science of analysing past data and trends in order to make predictions for the future. With predictive analytics we can anticipate future customer behaviour. This allows you to adjust your business strategy intelligently.
For example, you may have a retail business and need to predict how much all customers will spend next month, or how much a given customer will spend over a given year. All of these problems involve using statistics to look into the future. Of course we can never get the prediction exactly right but machine learning allows us to choose the prediction with the lowest deviation from the true value, or highest likelihood of being correct.
I have built predictive models to predict website traffic, purchases, online signups, customer spend on a customer and country wide level, NHS doctor attrition and trainee grade results, and more.
Techniques and technologies that I have worked with include:
- Regression and classification models (linear/polynomial/log regression, autoregressive models, etc)
- Time series models (ARMA, ARIMA, GARCH, exponential moving average, etc.)
- Spark MLLib
- Weka
If you have a prediction task in your business I would be very interested to hear from you.