Data science news

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Visualization provides decision-makers with the big picture

“Good visualizations can help people to make good decisions, such as selecting a suitable candidate in elections,” researcher Mikko Berg explains.

Berg’s dissertation belongs to the field of media technology and combines cognitive science, psychology and vision research. The dissertation explores how the brain processes visualization when the person handles complex data.

Berg examined how the use of visualization facilitates understanding by observing how people used the online candidate selectors created for the EU and communal elections held in Finland in 2004.

Predictive Analytics: The Race is On

High-performance analytics (HPA) allows modelers to work faster with full sets of data—not sample sets. This can provide the type of nuanced analytics that allows an insurer to be more successful in high-risk situations, create innovative—and profitable—new means of insuring customers, and respond to large-scale disasters in a more relevant and cost-effective way.

Intelligent use of Big Data

Business Intelligence could unlock of some of the estimated 85% of corporation data that is unstructured according to leading industry figure Bill Inmon.

Big Data Bubbles Up Trouble!

Today Big Data has made the impossible, possible. Collecting and analyzing unstructured data types such as social media data, web click streams, network and data center logs is no longer a daunting task. While Hadoop and MapReduce are the technologies behind the scenes to crunch massive volumes of data, advanced visualizations have become the art that show us the best (and worst) parts about our data.

British Columbia health care on the cutting edge of Big Data

Big Data can reveal the overlooked negative effects of a drug or, conversely, unexpected benefits and new treatments. It can lead us to insights into how a drug has worked over a vast population, enabling researchers to determine which doses are most effective, which are wrong-headed or perhaps dangerous. Tracking Big Data can help you find out if a medical procedure really gets the results we think and desire. Or it might reveal diagnostic and treatment mistakes we are making and suggest overlooked ways of improving health care. Plug in genetics, a factor that often influences how medicines and treatments work on an individual basis, and you are looking at the possibility of bespoke, genomic medicine – health care tailored to an individual, in much the same way as a tailor customizes a suit or dress.

Big Data can and will save lives. And it will almost certainly save money.

Big Data for Retail is Flying Off the Shelves

The holy grail of retail has been to anticipate what consumers need even before they realize they need it. There’s no better way to beat the competition than to make an attractive offer and get a customer’s business before they even realize they need your product, or consider evaluating alternatives.

Big Data Analytics Gold for the Call Center

Corporate call centers and call center providers are embracing new analytic tools to dig deeper into the big data they generate.