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Published: Jul 4, 2024
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7 min. read
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Celeste YatesContent Writer
- Celeste has worked in the online marketing space for twenty years. She has written for sectors including tourism, sustainability, education, lifestyle, food, and marketing. You can find her work featured by Green Building Media South Africa, Stodels Gardening, and The Post House Hotel. In magazines, you may have seen her in The Cape Times, Oprah South Africa, and The Property Magazine. While you can find her writing up on the latest SEO trends and exploring digital techniques during the day, her love of story-telling carries on in enriched games and books after hours.
Imagine being able to peek into the future and use that information to influence decisions you make today. Sounds like every business owner and manager’s dream! Well, what if I told you that you could do exactly that! Predictive analytics tools can give you the software you need to be a game changer in your industry today.
In this article, we will explain predictive analytics software and how it can help. We will then examine its different applications and, finally, examine some of the software that is available right now.
If you are looking at getting predictive analytics to support your marketing strategy, contact WebFX. We can give you the insights you need and then provide you with actionable steps to empower your business now, with tomorrow’s information. Contact us on 888-601-5359 to speak to a strategist.
Understanding predictive analytics
Raw data can be turned into actionable insights with the help of predictive analytic tools. With the help of predictive software, businesses can get info on trends, behaviors, and outcomes, which are based on current and past data.
There are a number of tactics used to predict analytics. Some systems use historical data, statistical algorithms, and now, machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the likelihood of future outcomes. The three main techniques are:
- Statistical modeling: In this technique, the system uses mathematical models that represent the relationships between the data. A few examples would be regression analysis which predicts a continuous outcome, or a classification algorithm which predicts categorical outcomes.
- Machine learning: The latest trend is AI machine learning. Here the AI learns algorithms from the data, to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed. It works it out from decision trees, neural networks, and ensemble methods such as gradient boosting.
- Data mining: When there are large amounts of data sets, then data mining is often used to uncover patterns and relationships. Common techniques here including association rule mining, anomaly detection, and clustering.
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Applications of predictive analytics
As predictive analytics tools leverage historical data to forecast future outcomes, you can imagine how this might be a game-changer for several industries. Here is an overview of how different sectors are utilizing this software in 2025:
Healthcare
Healthcare has a large amount of data, including patient information, symptoms, and hospital data for bed occupancy and resources. Predictive analytics tools can add efficiency to all of these areas.
For example, healthcare sectors can analyze patient data to predict the likelihood of readmissions. Another example would be analyzing symptoms and medical history to help diagnose diseases at early stages.
Finance
By analyzing customer data, banks can predict customer behavior, such as spending patterns and product preferences. But, the biggest difference predictive analytics tools are making is within the fraud sector.
Consumers have reported losing more than $10 billion to fraud in 2023 alone. To help reduce the rising statistic, financial institutions use predictive analytics to detect fraudulent activity by identifying unusual patterns and behaviors in transaction data.
Retail
Within the retail sector, predictive analytics software is often used to monitor stock management. The tools can forecast demand for products, ensuring that inventory levels are always maintained.
It is also used to personalize the client’s experience. It can segment customers and alter the journey to personalize their preferences. For example, it can alter related or recommended products once it’s established what the client likes through their wishlist and previous purchases.
Manufacturing
Like retail, the manufacturing sector can be used to forecast supply and demand, but it also is useful in other areas, such as quality control and predictive maintenance for equipment.
The predictive analytics tools can predict equipment failures and then automatically schedule maintenance proactively. The result is reduced downtime and maintenance costs.
Marketing
Marketing teams across all sectors use predictive maintenance to segment customers by analyzing their behavior. This can increase the effectiveness of campaigns. The tools evaluate the potential success of the marketing campaign before they do A/B testing.
It can also be used to identify patterns to offer personalized experiences for customers by analyzing their previous data.
5 Predictive analytics tools to use right now
Each predictive tool offers different unique features and capabilities that are tailored to different industries and user needs. Here are a few of those software solutions that could be the answer to your objectives:
1. Prophet: Free predictive analytic tools
Prophet uses R and/or Python coding to automate forecasts for the data scientific community created by the Facebook team. It can provide accurate and automated forecasts for time series data that can handle missing values, large datasets, and outliers. The software is free and open source for everyone to use.
The software can be used with minimal configuration required, making it ideal for beginners and experts alike. You can customize it for specific business needs, including custom holiday and trend changes.
2. SAP Analytics Cloud: Integrate with other tools
SAP Analytics Cloud brings together various analytics capabilities into a single environment. It integrates BI, augmented analytics, predicitve analytics and enterprise planning, all into one cloud solution. That’s a lot of features!
It can also have integration capabilities such as:
- Data integration: You can seamlessly connect to various data sources, including other SAP-systems, on-premises databases, and third-party applications.
- Real-time data: For quick decision-making, you can access real-time data with the latest insights.
- Extensions: There are over 430 extensions from over 100 partners to choose from. While some have purchasing options, others are free.
3. IBM Watson Studio: AI prediction software
IBM Watson Studio is an integrated AI platform that data scientists and application developers can use to create machine learning models efficiently. It offers many options, including data cleaning, preparing, and, most importantly for this article, predictive analytics.
There are three areas that the AI supports the analytics aspect of this tool:
- Natural language processing (NLP): Here it can be integrated with IBM Watson services to analyze text data and give insights.
- Computer vision: You can use the IBM Watson visual recognition for image analysis. It can also provide classification tasks.
- Time series: You can predict future trends and events by forecasting with the time series data feature.
4. H20.ai: Open Source option
H20.ai is an open source option that does require a bit of previous knowledge to utilize. However, it does come with easy-to-use tools and offers businesses scalability. You can use the open-source software version, but there are also commercial products available.
At its core, it is a machine-learning platform that can support a wide array of algorithms. The software can be integrated with other data science tools like R and Python. There is also a fair amount of automation features in the engineering and model selection, which increases its speed for prediction.
5. RapidMiner: Strong community support
RapidMiner has open-source and commercial software packages available, as well as an academy to train data specialists with its platform. There is a huge push for team collaboration with this software, and the user-friendly interface also invites beginners.
The drag-and-drop visual interface of RapidMiner makes it easy as well, along with templates to get you started. You can import data from various sources such as cloud data, social media, and datasets.
As a result, you will find extensive documentation and an active community around this software to guide you as you use it. There are also help videos and resource articles available on their website.
Using predictive analytics in your marketing with WebFX
As experts in marketing and sales analytics, our expertise is backed by over 1,100 client testimonials. Partnering with us means you’ll better understand your business data and leverage it to improve your marketing.
Our comprehensive analytics services cover every step outlined above, ensuring you can effectively turn new insights into actionable strategies. We’ve worked in 200+ industries, and our team of 500+ is ready to help you forecast your data.
Contact 888-601-5359 to speak to a strategist today!
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Celeste has worked in the online marketing space for twenty years. She has written for sectors including tourism, sustainability, education, lifestyle, food, and marketing. You can find her work featured by Green Building Media South Africa, Stodels Gardening, and The Post House Hotel. In magazines, you may have seen her in The Cape Times, Oprah South Africa, and The Property Magazine. While you can find her writing up on the latest SEO trends and exploring digital techniques during the day, her love of story-telling carries on in enriched games and books after hours.
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