<Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline . Please help to establish notability by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond its mere trivial mention . If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted . Find sources: "Prescriptive analytics"--news newspapers books scholar JSTOR (June 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline . Please help to establish notability by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond its mere trivial mention . If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted . Find sources: "Prescriptive analytics"--news newspapers books scholar JSTOR (June 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) </Td> </Tr> <P> Prescriptive analytics is the third and final phase of business analytics, which also includes descriptive and predictive analytics . </P> <P> Referred to as the "final frontier of analytic capabilities," prescriptive analytics entails the application of mathematical and computational sciences and suggests decision options to take advantage of the results of descriptive and predictive analytics . The first stage of business analytics is descriptive analytics, which still accounts for the majority of all business analytics today . Descriptive analytics looks at past performance and understands that performance by mining historical data to look for the reasons behind past success or failure . Most management reporting--such as sales, marketing, operations, and finance--uses this type of post-mortem analysis . </P>

When would descriptive and predictive results need additional analysis