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.