Prescriptive Analytics: A Survey of Emerging Trends And Technologies

This paper provides a survey of the state-of-
the-art and future directions of one of the most important
emerging technologies within Business Analytics
(BA), namely Prescriptive Analytics (PSA). BA focuses
on data-driven decision making and consists of
three phases: Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive
Analytics. While Descriptive and Predictive Analytics
allow us to analyze past and predict future events, respectively,
these activities do not provide any direct
support for decision making. Here, PSA lls the gap
between data and decisions. We have observed an increasing
interest for in-DBMS PSA systems in both research
and industry. Thus, this paper aims to provide
a foundation for PSA as a separate eld of study. To
do this, we rst describe the dierent phases of BA.
We then survey classical analytics systems and identify
their main limitations for supporting PSA, based
on which we introduce the criteria and methodology
used in our analysis. We next survey, categorize, and
discuss the state-of-the-art within emerging, so-called
PSA+, systems, followed by a presentation of the main
challenges and opportunities for next generation PSA
systems. Finally, the main ndings are discussed and
directions for future research are outlined.