Book Image

Practical Big Data Analytics

By : Nataraj Dasgupta
Book Image

Practical Big Data Analytics

By: Nataraj Dasgupta

Overview of this book

Big Data analytics relates to the strategies used by organizations to collect, organize, and analyze large amounts of data to uncover valuable business insights that cannot be analyzed through traditional systems. Crafting an enterprise-scale cost-efficient Big Data and machine learning solution to uncover insights and value from your organization’s data is a challenge. Today, with hundreds of new Big Data systems, machine learning packages, and BI tools, selecting the right combination of technologies is an even greater challenge. This book will help you do that. With the help of this guide, you will be able to bridge the gap between the theoretical world of technology and the practical reality of building corporate Big Data and data science platforms. You will get hands-on exposure to Hadoop and Spark, build machine learning dashboards using R and R Shiny, create web-based apps using NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and even learn how to write R code for neural networks. By the end of the book, you will have a very clear and concrete understanding of what Big Data analytics means, how it drives revenues for organizations, and how you can develop your own Big Data analytics solution using the different tools and methods articulated in this book.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface

Enterprise data science overview


Data science is a relatively new topic in terms of enterprise IT and analytics. Traditionally, researchers and analysts belonged broadly to one of two categories:

  • Highly technical researchers who used complex computing languages and/or hardware for their professional tasks
  • Analysts who could use tools such as Excel and BI platforms in order to perform both simple and complex data analysis

Organizations started looking into Big Data and, more generally, data science platforms in the late 2000s. It had gained immense momentum by 2013, when solutions such as Hadoop and NoSQL platforms were released. The following table shows the developments in data science:

Year

Developments

1970s to late 1990s

Widespread use of relational database management systems. Entity relationship model, structured query language (SQL), and other developments eventually led to a rapid expansion of databases in the late 90s.

Early 2000s

The anti-climatic, yet expensive, non-event of Y2K, coupled...