Big Data Analytics is the process of analyzing big data to uncover patterns and infer insights relevant for defining strategies.
What is Big Data?
Big data refers to information which is highly unstructured, and present in very large volumes. In earlier times, data could be easily structured into two dimensional tables and graphs. However, with the internet boom, businesses have to deal with copious amounts of data which cannot be summarized in forms of the tables we know. Taking an example, a collection of cars and their specifications can easily be consolidated in tabular form, whereas a collection of facebook posts cannot. The cars table would normally contain well defined text fields such as brand, model number, engine, etc. A facebook post, however is highly unstructured data. The meaning of unstructured data is that the type of data is not well defined. Unstructured data includes images, video files, audio files mixed textual content etc. The relevance of big data is not in operational processing, but has a high value in strategic analysis for businesses in today's scenario. Big data analytics play a huge role in sentiment analysis, tracking the behavioral patterns of customers etc.
The Four V's of Big Data
Volume
One of the key identifications of big data is its volume. Big data, as its name suggest is often characterized by the large volume of data unfit for conventional databases. According to this infographic, 2.5 trillion gigabytes of data are created everyday.
Velocity
Stream data is becoming a more common method of generating information today. Millions of terabytes of data is generated at a very fast rate.
Veracity
The more the data, the more the noise. With large volumes of data, big data is marked as being low in accuracy and high in uncertainty.
Variety
As mentioned before, big data is highly unstructured form of data, consisting of images, videos, statements, etc. 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook everyday.
Now that we know what big data is, we need more specialized tools to deal with this type of data. Relational databases or even conventional databases are not equipped for handling big data. Big Data Analytics is a field that includes study of tools to analyze big data.
Wednesday, 14 September 2016
