Data Analytics
Data Analytics
Data Analytics
Data analytics converts raw data into actionable insights. It includes a range of tools,
technologies, and processes used to find trends and solve problems by using data. Data
analytics can shape business processes, improve decision-making, and foster business growth.
Data analytics helps companies gain more visibility and a deeper understanding of their
processes and services. It gives them detailed insights into the customer experience and
customer problems. By shifting the paradigm beyond data to connect insights with action,
companies can create personalized customer experiences, build related digital products,
optimize operations, and increase employee productivity.
Big data describes large sets of diverse data—structured, unstructured, and semi-structured—
that are continuously generated at high speed and in high volumes. Big data is typically
measured in terabytes or petabytes. One petabyte is equal to 1,000,000 gigabytes. To put this
in perspective, consider that a single HD movie contains around 4 gigabytes of data. One
petabyte is the equivalent of 250,000 films. Large datasets measure anywhere from hundreds
to thousands to millions of petabytes.
Big data analytics is the process of finding patterns, trends, and relationships in massive
datasets. These complex analytics require specific tools and technologies, computational
power, and data storage that support the scale.
How does big data analytics work?
Big data analytics follows five steps to analyze any large datasets:
1. Data collection
2. Data storage
3. Data processing
4. Data cleansing
5. Data analysis
Data collection
This includes identifying data sources and collecting data from them. Data collection follows ETL
or ELT processes.
A data lake is different because it can store both structured and unstructured data without any
further processing. The structure of the data or schema is not defined when data is captured;
this means that you can store all of your data without careful design, which is particularly useful
when the future use of the data is unknown. Data examples include social media content, IoT
device data, and nonrelational data from mobile apps.Organizations typically require both data
lakes and data warehouses for data analytics
Data processing
When data is in place, it has to be converted and organized to obtain accurate results from
analytical queries. Different data processing options exist to do this. The choice of approach
depends on the computational and analytical resources available for data processing.
Centralized processing
All processing happens on a dedicated central server that hosts all the data.
Distributed processing
Data is distributed and stored on different servers.
Batch processing
Pieces of data accumulate over time and are processed in batches.
Real-time processing
Data is processed continually, with computational tasks finishing in seconds.
Data cleansing
Data cleansing involves scrubbing for any errors such as duplications, inconsistencies,
redundancies, or wrong formats. It’s also used to filter out any unwanted data for analytics.
Data analysis
This is the step in which raw data is converted to actionable insights. The following are four
types of data analytics:
1. Descriptive analytics
Data scientists analyze data to understand what happened or what is happening in the data
environment. It is characterized by data visualization such as pie charts, bar charts, line graphs,
tables, or generated narratives.
2. Diagnostic analytics
Diagnostic analytics is a deep-dive or detailed data analytics process to understand why
something happened. It is characterized by techniques such as drill-down, data discovery, data
mining, and correlations. In each of these techniques, multiple data operations and
transformations are used for analyzing raw data.
3. Predictive analytics
Predictive analytics uses historical data to make accurate forecasts about future trends. It is
characterized by techniques such as machine learning, forecasting, pattern matching, and
predictive modeling. In each of these techniques, computers are trained to reverse engineer
causality connections in the data.
4. Prescriptive analytics
Prescriptive analytics takes predictive data to the next level. It not only predicts what is likely to
happen but also suggests an optimum response to that outcome. It can analyze the potential
implications of different choices and recommend the best course of action. It is characterized
by graph analysis, simulation, complex event processing, neural networks, and
recommendation engines.
What are the different data analytics techniques?
Many computing techniques are used in data analytics. The following are some of the most
common ones:
Text mining
Data analysts use text mining to identify trends in text data such as emails, tweets, researches,
and blog posts. It can be used for sorting news content, customer feedback, and client emails.
Outlier analysis
Outlier analysis or anomaly detection identifies data points and events that deviate from the
rest of the data.
Can data analytics be automated?
Yes, data analysts can automate and optimize processes. Automated data analytics is the
practice of using computer systems to perform analytical tasks with little or no human
intervention. These mechanisms vary in complexity; they range from simple scripts or lines of
code to data analytics tools that perform data modeling, feature discovery, and statistical
analysis.
For example, a cybersecurity firm might use automation to gather data from large swathes of
web activity, conduct further analysis, and then use data visualization to showcase results and
support business decisions.