Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive Analytics, a preliminary stage of data processing, exemplifies retrospective analysis that drills through the past behaviors and provides an insight into the future outcomes. Descriptive Analytics, famously known as Business Intelligence (BI), is used by many organizations to study past experiences by summarizing the raw data. This basic form of analytics uses business reporting through not only examining the past, but also in providing an approach for the future.

While using data mining and data aggregation techniques in descriptive analytics may shed some light on what has already happened and what is currently happening, data visualization and additional querying are needed to achieve deeper insights.

Descriptive analytics come into picture when an aggregation is needed to filter historic data and analyze the performance of a company at an aggregate level.

Real World Examples:

• Social Media –  Marketers and social media professionals use Google’s analytics tools to pull web result statistics and other types of data. Based on the web results, a company can analyze their performance and take measures ensuring a satisfactory level of performance in future endeavors.
• Utilities – By drilling through past data of electricity usage, power generating companies can set optimum pricing for their currently subscribed customers in an attempt to ensure an analysis based pricing structure.

Manufacturing – By analyzing past sales and inventory stock, manufacturing companies can inform the decision to expand their inventory by assessing the knowledge gained from this form of descriptive analytics.

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