According to the Guide to Business Data Analytics, descriptive analytics is a type of analytics that summarizes and presents data in a meaningful way. Descriptive analytics uses techniques such as statistics, charts, tables, and dashboards to provide an overview of what has happened or is happening in the data. Descriptive analytics can help answer questions such as who, what, when, where, and how. In this situation, the analyst has been asked to look through past sales data to help guide product decisions. The business sponsor for this initiative would first like to know ‘What is the most profitable product line?’. This is a descriptive analytics question, as it involves summarizing and presenting the past sales data by product line and calculating the profit margin for each product line.

References: Guide to Business Data Analytics, page 49; CBDA Exam Blueprint, page 7; [Introduction to Business Data Analytics: A Practitioner View], page 14.