Predictive analytics is a powerful technique that ‘predicts’ the future, in a sense. It can help answer key questions, such as how many products a business could sell in the next three months and how much profit it is likely to make.

Using sales as an example, it’s essential to know past sales data in order to predict future sales. The past sales data and cleaned data from descriptive analytics are mixed to create a dataset to train an ML model.

The built model predicts future sales, say, for the next few months. The predicted quantities sold and profits made are compared with the actual numbers sold and profits made. The actual profits could be more or less than what was predicted. The model is refined to overcome such limitations and improve the accuracy of predictions.