Big Data Analysis: Characteristics and Applications

The term Big Data was first coined by Roger Mougalas in the year 2005. Big Data is giant data sets that are too complex or almost impossible to manage if you use traditional data management tools. Big data analysis is the strategy to manage and handle the immense and voluminous information.

The information is extracted from various sources and is processed in order to find out the hidden patterns and correlations between the fetched information.

The information fetched can be either structured, semi-structured and unstructured. Big Data contains four Vs – Variety, Velocity, Volume, and Veracity.

The huge variety, volume, velocity, and veracity of the data is what makes it, exclusively large.

Characteristics of Big Data

Big has many characteristics but there are some main characteristics that are as followed:

1. Huge Volume – The ‘Big’ in big data stands for the large volume of data. To understand this concept let’s take an example, in YouTube, people search for millions of videos every second and also upload many videos every second, etc. this huge information is the large volume of data. But YouTube is only one element there are other elements like Gmail, Google searches, etc.

2. Variety – Along with the huge volume, the variety is also large of the big data. The information is gathered from a number of different sources. These different sources are related to a different variety. Huge variety of data is classified and stored in a structured and manageable manner so that it can be used for decision making purpose.

3. Velocity – As the raw information gets accumulated at a high speed, it’s high-speed processing also becomes essential. Because if these records are not handled in a timely manner, then it becomes useless. Therefore, the velocity is an important factor.

4. Veracity – Veracity is the accuracy of the data. The statistics that we have collected must be accurate and should serve the purpose to provide informational facts.

Applications of Big Data

It has huge applications in the current scenario. Some of its applications include:

• Online Shopping – Big online companies like Amazon, Flipkart, and such big and international companies use big data. They use it to analyze the changing demands and trends of consumer preferences. It also helps in suggesting different products to the customer according to their searches. You might have noticed if you are searching for the headphones or mobile phones, then after a few days or after some time, the user gets the advertises or recommendation for the same category. In this way, it used for the analytical purpose in online shopping.

• Weather Forecasting – We all know that there are a number of satellites that are revolving around the earth. These satellites send different types of information every second. This facts helps in weather forecasting and studying or analyzing different patterns and changes that are taking place in the climate. Different aspects of relating to nature like global warming, the occurrence of natural disaster, etc. can be studied using the big data analysis.

• Government Sector – It is also useful for the government in various sectors. It helps in better decision making. Plans and strategies are taken after analyzing different facts and figures, these facts and statistics are provided with the help of big data thereby helping the government authorities to make decisions for the welfare of the citizens. Other sectors where it is used by the government is saving natural resources, transportation, agriculture, etc. 

• Healthcare Industry – Healthcare is another industry that makes the optimum use of big data. Birth and death rate are constantly varying. It helps in recording all such information. It also helps in studying different facets relating to patients and diseases. It helps in the prediction of different diseases at early stages and their medicinal effects on humans. Medicines can be provided according to their effectiveness on the patients. 

• Banking Sector – In the banking sector, information is increasing every second. This collected information is of high confidentiality and hence, needs to be taken proper care. They can use big data for preventing the misuse of debit or credit cards, prevention of frauds, money laundering, etc. It helps in preventing illegal activities. 

Apart from these sectors, there is a number of other sectors where big data is used. It includes many concepts like data warehousing and mining, programming understanding, etc. These concepts are important to understand the working and functioning of big data.

Author Bio 

I am William Lucas, an SEO Content Writer and I have optimized blog content articles, descriptions, meta tags, etc. for small businesses. I have also worked for providing assignment help to university and college students. I live in Sydney, Australia.