Practical Predictive Analytics

Getting Started with Predictive Analytics

"In God we trust, all others must bring Data"

- Deming

I enjoy working and explaining predictive analytics to people because it is based upon a simple concept: predicting the probability of future events based upon historical data. Its history may date back to at least 650 BC. Some early examples include the Babylonians, who tried to predict short-term weather changes based on cloud appearances and halos: Weather Forecasting through the Ages, NASA.

Medicine also has a long history of needing to classify diseases. The Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina decreed that medical records be collected to form the Diagnostic Handbook. Some predictions in this corpus list treatments based on the number of days ...