What is Big Data Analytics and Why It is Important?

Big data analytics is important as this is the age of big data. It is a study of the huge amount of stored data to extract behavior patterns. Big data is made at high speed and contains volume, variety, and veracity. Because only social media platforms generate almost 500 terabytes of data. This data comprises documents, pictures, and videos. Our smartphones, tablets and GPS devices, bank cards generate more than 2.5 trillion bytes of information each day. So how can we use all this information? Here is when big data analytics becomes relevant. The integration of technology and mathematics works and analyzes all big data from different resources. It extracts valuable data and is thus used by companies and governments.

Now, the question is why companies or governments need this and how extracted data serve any means for these working bodies? To understand this, let’s look into the types and how these work? There are three types of data: structured, that contains data related Xl sheets, main frame and more. The unstructured data contains social media platforms and hybrid structured data contains marketing data, e-commerce and more. All these categories contains different types of data.

This big data can be analyzed using four types of analytics such as

Descriptive

It describes the past happenings based on the data available in form of reports and graphics.

Diagnostic

It links to descriptive type as diagnostic analytics seeks to understand why such happening happened in the past. It brings more details of descriptive analysis.

Predictive

It is a resourceful analysis type for companies as it analyzes data to understand what could happen from the events that happened in the past.

Prescriptive

It depends on Automation processing or a/b testing as it brings a solution to the accruing problem. Because it works with descriptive and predictive analytics. The system analyzes and predicts data and provides solutions as to how to proceed according to them by recommending solutions. For example, what are the best template suggestions for your website and thus recommending options? Big data analytics help businesses understand the UX better. Because it finds overlooked opportunities and services and thus helps to understand how one can make the best use of these. It also helps to navigate how one can mitigate fraud.

Big Data Analytics Tools

There are different tools to analyze the various fields of data such as healthcare, transportation and more. Different tools help in the process of analytics of data from different field. The tools that analyze data are as such

Step#1: Evaluation

In this step, the business problem is brought to the table and the teams describe the causes of setting particular goals related to this analytics.

Step#2: Data Collection

In this step, the big data collection starts where the process of collecting data from different resources takes place. All this relevant data may provide value to the particular category your company is targeting. It is then the data filtering process starts.

Step#3: Data Extraction

After filtering the data, the process of sorting out relevant data takes place. Because once you identified the relevant data, the filtering and extracting help narrow down the data of the targeted category. Thus, the extracted data is then going through the process of integration with different data sets of the same category.

Step#4: Data Analysis

Now, the fun part begins, when using tools to analyze all the extracted data and thus find the useful information.

Step#5: Creating Visuals of Analytics

Here, you can use different tools such as Tableau and Power BI to create visuals for your analytics.

Step#6: Data Analytics Results

Lastly, the data analytics results have complied to provide to stakeholders who then take further action.

Hence, the process of data analytics goes through different steps that help to identify, filter, extract and analyze data. In the digital world, the data serves as oil to any company therefore big data becomes resourceful. It provides crucial information that saves time, reduces cost and creates new ideas regarding products and services of your company.