Chapter 7. Prescriptive Science and Decision Making

Predictive analytics scales the power of analytics and decision making to a paramount level. We can consider our daily life as an example. If we have an answer to the 'when' question, it can help us take better decisions to secure our future. Visibility into the future makes life easy for everyone. The same holds true for problem solving in decision science. The nature of the problem can be descriptive, inquisitive, predictive, or prescriptive. Prescriptive science or Prescriptive Analytics answers the question 'So what, now what?' and aims at improving the outcome of the problem. We often ask this question after we see an issue in the routine operations.

Prescriptive analytics is a fuzzy transition from the combination of descriptive, inquisitive, and predictive analytics. The problem reaches a point where we continuously iterate through different questions either to recover from a disaster or further improve...