Data science news

Reading Time: 3 mins

Balancing the push and pull between change and data visualizations

Market researchers face the challenge of balancing the thrilling pace of DATA VISUALIZATION trends, with giving clients the tried and trusted reports that they know and love.

Showing relationships and patterns in data through visualization, is an important and powerful aspect of communication. It can simplify the complex, and give meaning where none may have been apparent before.

Now we want to show social media trends. We want to investigate patterns in huge swathes of data that has been collected from every corner of our lives. We are constantly looking for relationships, patterns and insights in everything we do.

As consumers of market research data, we want to visualize everything. We want static graphs in newspapers; online static reports, perhaps partially animated; we want interactive reporting and dashboards, and one-pager email…the list grows and morphs at an ever-increasing pace.

Data Analytics: Reaping the Data Dividend

The availability of new data types, such as online customer reviews, customer sentiment analysis, socio-political events, or macro-economic trends provides a compass of sorts, helping risk managers improve their oversight of risk positions and regulatory compliance, and giving CMOs a better understanding of customer preferences.

While processing, calculating and analyzing data is not new to an industry long steeped in margins, rates and yields, today’s financial institutions are seeing the use of data as a new form of currency. Combining current, more traditional data with less traditional, unstructured data streams, and feeding them into an analytics solution, can help CMOs interpret the life of the customer, how they use your product and where there’s an opportunity to meet an unmet need.

Over the next four years, the research showed that financial services institutions and related companies worldwide have the potential to gain more than $308 billion in value from data, or what we call the “data dividend.

How visualizing big data brings meaning to clinical analytics

Now that the healthcare informatics industry has figured out how to harvest Big Data, the next big challenge is figuring out how to display the information in ways that are useful.

Data visualization tools have made it somewhat easier to glean intelligence from volumes of information in the hopes of improving health programs, clinical healthcare delivery, and public health policy. But they have failed to incorporate the science of human visual perception into the technology, resulting in tools that deliver great “eye candy” but poor human comprehension of the data.

Helping people find outliers, expose hidden trends or clusters, and dive deep into fast changing data sets is where visualization provides real value. As healthcare meets the “Internet of things,” the ability to discover anomalies in real-time streaming data from thousands of medical devices, sensors and monitors will be of huge value. Or as EHR databases become ubiquitous, for example, effective visualization of the data could unveil previously unseen adverse treatment patterns.

Data Analytics to Drive Financial Services Market to New Heights

New data analytics tools are changing the way firms deliver information to users, and it is clear that older data delivery models aren’t making the cut.

Nimble companies in this space have clearly chosen 2014 as the year in which they will ditch decades-long processes in favor of more data-driven, automated, impactful methods of collecting, reviewing, and acting on information. These first movers are redefining expectations for financial data analytics, and their competitors would be wise to take heed.

For companies that continue to collect and review data the same way they did 20 years ago, this year will serve as a wakeup call. This shift has been a long time coming. Even after the market meltdown in 2008 and the passage of SEC regulations for using standardized financial data disclosures, apprehensive firms clung to slow or no evolution, while their more innovative counterparts were busy investigating technologies capable of shaking up the status quo to better serve clients.