Effective companies make use of numerous data sources. These can range from customer activity to supplier prices, data processing throughput, system logs, and so on, depending on the nature of the business. By just having the data, even graphing it using a plotly graph, like the one we developed in Chapter 3, A Blueprint for Making Sense of Feedback, might not be proactive enough. Usually, it's not the case that somebody is watching every data stream or graph constantly. Thus, it is equally important that the data can be summarized, and the right people be notified when interesting events occur. These events could be anything from changes in the overall trend of the data to anomalous activity. In fact, the two analyses, trends, and anomalies are sometimes found with the same techniques, as we will discover in this chapter.
Trends and anomalies may also serve as a user-facing feature of a company's services. There are...