Which aspect of business intelligence focuses on understanding what happened in the past?

Descriptive analytics is the aspect of business intelligence that specifically concentrates on understanding historical data and events. It involves analyzing past data to identify trends, patterns, and insights that provide a comprehensive view of what has occurred in a specific period. By summarizing historical data through various statistical methods and visualization techniques, descriptive analytics helps organizations gain insights into their performance, operations, and customer behavior.

For instance, businesses might use descriptive analytics to generate reports detailing sales figures from previous quarters, employee productivity metrics, or customer satisfaction scores over time. This retrospective analysis is essential for informing future strategies and decision-making processes.

While prescriptive analytics focuses on recommending actions based on data, predictive analytics aims to forecast future outcomes based on historical trends, and real-time analytics deals with assessing data as it becomes available, none of these approaches are centered around the interpretation of past events as described in the context of descriptive analytics.