Data is the starting point, predictive analytics is the next step, but prescriptive analytics for decisions is the "top of the analytics food chain." This is where the biggest business payoffs, but also the biggest shortage of skilled analysts, are usually found. Attend this hands-on lab precon to get a thorough understanding of the advanced analytics and what-if modeling capabilities available in Excel.

We'll start the morning with the core ideas of data science, including an overview of statistics and machine learning, and focus on your key role in visualization and feature selection. By lunchtime, we'll move into a deeper understanding of data and predictions.

In the afternoon, we'll examine data-driven what-if models, and how to maximise decision trees, Monte Carlo simulations, and/or optimization to find the best choices, for business plans and processes with many future scenarios, and individual decisions.