Big Data

Article contributed by Danish Wadhwa: Big data is all about using tools and processes to generate insights from a bulk of data. This data has one of three characteristics – high speed, extreme variety, and large volume. The correlations and conclusions that big data derives are comprehensible and are difficult…

Perhaps the only benefit of being involved in the IT industry for a protracted period is that things repeat, and as a result it becomes fairly straightforward to estimate how trends might develop. When relational database was introduced in the early eighties, it became the province of various geeks (of…

Oh no, not another article on big data, I hear you say. Breath out – it’s about something more fundamental. There are two ways of using data. The first, typified by big data, is to collect enormous amounts of the stuff, believing that a few gold nuggets might be found…

It’s becoming fairly well known that big data can be problematical, and particularly when we come to analysis. Perhaps the best known issue is that of the power law that accompanies the proliferation of attributes and features often associated with big data. Instead of holding maybe twenty or thirty customer…

Big data is not just bigger small data. It introduces issues that never really reared their head with traditional, modestly sized transaction databases. This is particularly true of analytics, and apart from regulatory requirements, why would we possibly want to store petabytes of data other than for analysis? Overfitting, or…

Of course it’s easy to sit back and say ‘I told you so’, but actually there are several pre-Brexit articles on this web site talking about the dangers of big data and analytics. – they are listed at the end. That the poll forecasters got it so wrong for Brexit…

Every time the human race has been faced with an explosion of information and data, so a period of decline has followed. The introduction of the printing press ushered in a couple of hundred years of religious wars, because of the widespread availability of books and documents that promoted this…

We need analytics to answer questions and discover hidden facts about our businesses. The questions are endless. Why did sales of a certain product spike last quarter? What strategies will reduce customer churn? How can we identify fraudulent activity? Business analytics technologies provide the means to answer many of these…

Big data is exciting, full of potential, and dangerous. The term now encapsulates data mining, business intelligence, predictive analytics, data visualization, and pretty much everything else we might want to do with data. So, here are five ways you can really damage your business with big data: Predictive Analytics and…