A subscription-box company has four analytics initiatives on its roadmap. The CFO asks which one is the predictive analytics project.
Which initiative is predictive analytics?
Why did you pick that answer? Two or three sentences. The act of articulating it is what builds the judgment — not the click that follows.
Predictive analytics produces an estimate about a future, unobserved outcome for a specific unit — here, each subscriber's chance of cancelling next month. The dashboard and A/B summary describe what already happened; the optimizer prescribes what to do. Prediction sits in the middle and feeds the prescription.
A churn-rate dashboard reports the past. Nothing in it estimates what an individual subscriber will do next.
Allocating a budget is a decision, not a forecast. It may consume predictions, but the optimizer is prescriptive analytics (ISOM 839 territory).
An A/B test measures a causal effect that already occurred. It informs future decisions but does not score future outcomes per unit.