Sometime ago, I wrote an article titled “What is data analytics? And what are the different types of data analytics?”. In that post, I described four types of analytics:

• Descriptive Analytics – what has happened?
• Diagnostic Analytics – why something happened?
• Predictive Analytics – what may happen (in the future)?
• Prescriptive Analytics – what to do to make something happen?

You can read that full article here.

New capabilities and solutions have led to a new classification of analytics called Cognitive Analytics.

Cognitive Analytics involves bringing together technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning to apply human-like behavior to data tasks at unhuman scale, such as, searching through massive amounts of data and making sense of its contexts and be able to provide information from it, such as a likely answer or a sentiment score. This form of analytics provides new solutions that do not fit into any of the other four classifications and, in short, can be dubbed as “what is found or derived“.

There are many use cases that could benefit from this type of analytics, such as, personalization of services at scale, and improved customer service efficiency.

Thanks for reading and best wishes on your data journey!