What is "advanced analytics"?

Think of it in three levels:

• Descriptive: "What happened?" — reports, dashboards, KPIs. You're summarising the past.
• Diagnostic: "Why did it happen?" — drill-downs, segmentation, root-cause analysis. You're explaining the past.
• Advanced: "What will happen?" or "What should we do?" — forecasting, scoring, optimisation, recommendations. You're using data to inform future decisions or actions.

Advanced analytics uses algorithms — step-by-step procedures that learn from data or apply rules — to do that. The rest of this guide is about what those algorithms do, how they're built, and how the work is done in traditional vs agentic setups.

The gap between knowing these levels exist and acting on them in production is where most teams stall. TrueState automates the steps between identifying what is possible and operating on it reliably on your warehouse. See the platform →