Question

In 250 words, describe the main differences between Trend Analysis and Predictive Analysis.

Answer 1

Ans)

Trend analysis is a technique to determine future movements of a given variable by analyzing historical data. It uses time series data, It's forecasting completely depends on the numbers from past. Typically it plots the numerical data on a graph and attempts to find a pattern(constant, linear, exponential), based on pattern it forecasts the future. forecasting sales, weather etc comes under trends analsyis.

Predictive analytics is used to make predictions about unknown future events. It uses many techniques from data mining, modelling, statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze the current data and to make the predictions about future. In this the input data may or may not be numbers but in case of trends analysis it's mostly numeric values. so, we can say predictive analysis problems are subset of Predictive analysis problems. Many sectors/areas likes Retail, health, sports, social media analysis etc uses predictive analysis.

For example, predicting future oil prices in international markets from past price points is an example of forecasting. Whereas predicting what you are likely to buy from your past shopping behaviour is an example of predictive analysis.

In the first case there is no separate input or output variable but in the second case you use several input variables to arrive at an output variable.