Analytics involves techniques as simple as descriptive statistics and visualization as well as more advanced predictive modeling, prescriptive and newly emerging artificial intelligence $($AI$)$ and cognitive analytics. How could prescriptive analytics be described?

used to build models based on the past to explain the future such as using historical customer sales data to predict future sales.

identifies the best optimal course of action such as how UPS efficiently maps drivers through a city using optimized routes.

is designed to mimic human$-$like intelligence for certain tasks such as discovering patterns in data, recognizing objects from an image, understanding the meaning of text and processing voice commands.

a set of techniques used to explain or quantify the past such as data queries, outcomes related to mean, median, mode, variance.