Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techniques from statistics, data mining and game theory that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events. In business, predictive models exploit patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify risks and opportunities. Models capture relationships among many factors to allow assessment of risk or potential associated with a particular set of conditions, guiding decision making for candidate transactions. One of the most well-known applications is credit scoring, which is used throughout financial services. Scoring models process a customer''s credit history, loan application, customer data, etc., in order to rank-order individuals by their likelihood of making future credit payments on time. Predictive analytics are also used in insurance, telecommunications, retail, travel, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and other fields.