James Taylor's Decision Management

I recently wrote an article on moving to predictive analytics as an issue of my column "Rules, Analytics, Decisions" for the Business Rules Community. Membership is free and if you have an interest in business rules and decision management it is well worth joining.
This article discusses how predictive analytic techniques analyze current and historical data to make predictions about future events. Note that these are rarely absolute statements ("Customer X will not renew at the end of this contract period") but are more likely to be odds of a particular event taking place in the future ("Segment X is those customers twice as likely to cancel as renew"). Using these techniques allows us to turn uncertainty into probability — from not knowing who is a retention risk to being able to estimate roughly how likely someone is to be a retention risk for example.