What is the primary use of descriptive analytics?

Descriptive analytics is primarily focused on summarizing historical data to provide insights into past performance. It involves the use of statistical techniques and tools to collect, process, and analyze data sets, ultimately presenting them in a way that is easy to understand. By creating reports, visualizations, and dashboards, descriptive analytics enables organizations to comprehend what has happened within a given time frame.

This type of analytics often answers questions about trends, patterns, and behaviors based on historical data, which helps stakeholders make informed decisions by understanding their current position in relation to past events.

The other choices represent different forms of analytics: predicting future trends falls under predictive analytics, identifying root causes is more aligned with diagnostic analytics, and recommending future actions relates to prescriptive analytics. Each serves a unique purpose, but descriptive analytics is fundamentally about providing a clear and comprehensive summary of past data to inform stakeholders.