Predictive Analytics: The Core of Data Mining

Data Mining has been defined in a number of ways by researchers. The two major types of analytics in Data Mining are descriptive and predictive. The goal of descriptive analytics is to discover patterns in data. Predictive Analytics, by contrast, goes beyond finding patterns in data and attempts to predict the outcome for unobserved (future) data. This paper discusses the role of predictive analytics in Data Mining. Some algorithms of predictive analytics are described in detail.