Predictive analytics is not the easiest concept to wrap your head around. It’s all too easy to get lost in explanations about statistics, game theory, modeling, and the rest, and end up with a muddy understanding of a process that draws on historical facts, like customer data, to make predictions about the future.

A recent article in the MIT Technology Review, What Will Your Customers Buy Next?, does a great job explaining the business results delivered by predictive analytics, by highlighting an example of how Cabela’s (a SAS customer) uses predictive models to rank customers and better decide which customers should receive which catalogs. The article reports that “Since introducing the model, Cabela's has quadrupled the rate of responses to its catalogue.” That’s good stuff.

Click through the links below to read the full article, and to read a success story on how SAS helps Cabela’s reel in more customers.

More information

• Read the complete Technology Review article.
• Access the SAS customer success story for Cabela's.
• Access the SAS press release for Cabela's (published in 2009).