Data science news

Reading Time: 3 mins

Looking at the Big Picture: How Big Data Gets Personal 

Industries from technology to advertising, healthcare to government are abuzz about the ability to draw new insights from their data. As computer processing power has increased and the price of data storage has fallen, huge pools of data can now be captured, analyzed and paired with other sets of data from still more sources.

In the healthcare industry, vast pools of data can be used to develop new drugs, diagnostics or protocols. It can also offer researchers and clinicians the ability to tailor existing treatments to individuals based on the genetic components of their condition.

“We try and leverage very, very large-scale data of very, very deep complexity to probe questions about how biology works and that can be used to help patients,” said Andrew Kasarskis, co-director of Mount Sinai’sInstitute for Genomics and Multi  scale Biology.

Big Data Holds Big Promise for Government 

Scientists in Singapore, are developing software to turn cities into “real-time control systems” that combines all sorts of data feeds like information about rainfall and the   location of taxis so the government can match the demand and the supply of taxis in specific weather conditions, particularly when it rains – a common occurrence in Singapore.

Furthermore, the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London is combining data from London’s Oyster cards, used to pay for public transport and Twitter messages. Tube-travel patterns are regular: people who enter the system at one station tend to leave it at a particular other one.Twitter messages reveal a city’s structure and its activity.

Immersive Visualization: The Future of Data Presentation

The goal of data visualization is more than simply conveying information. Spreadsheets and Word documents can perform that same function in tightly organized columns. But visualization allows us to draw lines between data points like a constellation and present the viewer with a fully-formed concept in a way that rows and columns cannot. If we take it a step further, we can even use visualization to create a fully interactive experience.

Call to action: how to make the most of big travel data 

Travel companies can use data analytics to create competitive advantage.

Travel companies are taking a closer look at formal data management strategies in order to derive more value from data assets. Data analytics is an interesting  prospect for the travel sector as so many data streams can be combined.

Predictive sports analytics put in play for Wimbledon, Formula One 

Here’s a safe sporting bet: take any roomful of fans of, say, cricket or baseball, and you can guarantee that there will be at least one person there with an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport’s history, including players’ highest scores, batting averages and strike rates. There’s something about sport that attracts the anoraks. But here’s another sure-fire bet: knowing about past performance is about to become old hat. The smart money now is on using data to predict future sporting outcomes. Sports analytics promises to be the bookmaker’s worst nightmare.

Advanced data visualization – a critical BI component 

As you venture down the ADV road, Forrester recommends paying at least equal (if  not more) attention to ADV best practices as you do to technology. Forrester has identified multiple such practices including screen layouts, data-to-ink ratios,  appropriate use of text and labels, using similar sequencing of objects, using parallel scales, minimizing the use of color, showing causality, and many more.

Read more about ADV research and remember: a picture speaks a thousand words!

Big Data Is The Future Of Marketing

Welcome to the era of performance brand marketing where measurement of social engagement using big data will transform the way brand marketers view the internet.

Big data analytics finally allows marketers to identify, measure, and manage what is positively impacting their brand. Social media activity harvested from the entire open social web with technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra, Mahout and Pig combined with advanced analytic techniques like natural language processing, semantic analysis, machine learning, and cluster analysis can reveal the true consequences of marketing actions online.

These developments enable a whole new world of brand measurement for digital marketers. Unlike most approaches to web analytics that can only attribute directly measurable consumer action, big data analysis of social performance offers campaign data that correlates with impact on brand. For example, in Super Bowl XLVI anlysts used big data to analyze the actual engagement of all the Super Bowl ads during the game. The traditional measure provided by USA Today AdMeter suggested that Coca-Cola had done rather poorly, yet when examined the actual levels of consumer response and engagement Coca-Cola’s was top of the charts.