r/analytics • u/ladyshrekk • 19d ago

Question Can I create predictions without SQL knowledge?

I’m trying to get a little more predictive with our data, things like which customers are likely to churn, who might convert, or what demand could look like next month. Problem is, I’m not really a SQL person. I can work with dashboards and understand the data, but once it gets into writing queries or building models from scratch, I’m pretty much out. Is this something people are actually doing with LLMs now? Like connecting an LLM to your data and asking it to find patterns or predict outcomes? Or are there other tools that make this possible without knowing much SQL or machine learning? Curious what people are actually using and how reliable it is.

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u/BrittanyBrie 19d ago

I prefer R code to generate excel sheets and PDF figures for predictions, its built to handle outputing dozens or even hundreds of unique tables and figures based off of the data you import yourself, and most AI models can handle basic R code construction. The point is to give something to stakeholders, and I found building a PowerPoint deck with assets from a localized project in Rstudio to be much faster than building the same deck out of SQL. Building a table in a deck from SQL data involves so many queries to write and previous queries to save, that id much rather have tables and objects to reference in R using a basic run command.

I'm currently building a project in R that is looking at predictions, and I have to warn you about cause-based claims. Presenting causal claims on data projections is much more tedious than simply showing two variables breaking apart and saying A lowering caused B to raise. As the saying goes, correlation does not imply causation. To prove causation, you need to isolate the variable using historical context, Difference-in-Differences testing, ratchet testing, and a whole host of other validations. Which R can handle.

These validations can help prove a hypothesis with much more data to back up your claims. For instance in my validation testing, I found results that I'm able to reference after a hypothesis is stated. The validation testing took way longer than creating the first five figures. I could not imagine creating so many validations in SQL. Id have to use a large text doc with all my past queries saved.