Forecasting Versus Predicting

Rob Collie explains that there are two different concepts which use similar names:

Once you’ve digested the illustration at the top of this article, yeah, you’ve kind already got it.

• Forecasting is when we anticipate the behavior of “Lots” of people (customers, typically) on “Long” timelines.
• Predictive Analytics anticipate the behavior of One person (again, typically a customer) on a “Short” timeline.

So…  Macro versus Micro.

But let’s delve just a little bit deeper, in order to “cement” the concepts.

There’s a very useful distinction here and Rob does well to flesh out the details.  I highly recommend this if you’re curious about micro- versus macro-level predictions.