Predictive Analytics and Information Retrieval (IR) - how do they differ?

	Information Retrieval	Predictive Analytics
General Purpose	Multi-database, open-ended research	Prediction, classification and scoring
Scope of Results	Wide	Narrow
Type of Results	Entire Documents from various sources, such as internal databases, document collections, and Google results.	A single value, such as a risk percentage (e.g., "42%"), classification ("red", "blue", "green"), or predicted value. (e.g., "54.2")
Setup	Connect to source databases, then perform any desired query.	Develop a custom model for each task.
Typical Uses	Research background info on a given technical issue.	Pinpoint high-risk situations among hundreds or even millions of known cases.
Mechanism	Sophisticated indexing of source documents.	Discover complex patterns in high-dimensional spaces.
How are results found?	Matching against a user-supplied ad-hoc query.	Matching against mathematical patterns that were learned during a training phase.
Strengths	Flexibility - handle any ad-hoc query on the fly.	Automation - provide answers without user intervention..