I am always at a loss in describing the skills of predictive analytics, for there are many. I am working on another book about analytics that has a different approach than Predictive Analytics using R, though I am using material from three chapters. The new book is an operations research approach to analytics, covering a different set of methods, skill and tools. Combined, the two books are over 1000 pages, so perhaps you can see my dilemma. Hence, this article is going to touch the basic skills required and several useful tool.