Crunching Numbers for Real World Solution

Do you know how to decipher the language of data science and use large volumes of data to find answers to business problems?

- Shiphony Pavithran Suri

Imagine, your boss giving you customers’ demographics and asking you to come up with a meaningful conclusion to design a product. If you are not curious about the data and its usage you will not be able to provide the right solution. Data analytics, using computer-based tools provides the solution. These applications help discover patterns and relationships in large volumes of data, enabling interpretation of the result and form business strategies. “Big data analytics is tightly embedded in our daily lives. It is used in finance markets for algorithm trading, online shopping for recommendations and airlines for optimized routing,” says Srinivas Chilukuri, Data Science Manager at ZS Associates, Pune.

Managing data

With the information explosion happening around us, large unstructured data sets, arising out of weblogs, social media posts, sensors, images, e-mails and video files, need to be harnessed and analyzed. “Through Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, the data analysts can detect and learn our patterns and preferences and start selecting top articles for our newsfeed,” shares Sonya Hooja, Co-Founder & COO, Imarticus Learning, a financial services and analytics education firm. For instance, if Twitter handles more than 6000 tweets per second then that means 500 million tweets are posted per minute or 500 million per day. So a lot of processing power is needed to handle this data.

What is data analytics?