Book Image

Analytics for the Internet of Things (IoT)

By : Andrew Minteer
5 (1)
Book Image

Analytics for the Internet of Things (IoT)

5 (1)
By: Andrew Minteer

Overview of this book

We start with the perplexing task of extracting value from huge amounts of barely intelligible data. The data takes a convoluted route just to be on the servers for analysis, but insights can emerge through visualization and statistical modeling techniques. You will learn to extract value from IoT big data using multiple analytic techniques. Next we review how IoT devices generate data and how the information travels over networks. You’ll get to know strategies to collect and store the data to optimize the potential for analytics, and strategies to handle data quality concerns. Cloud resources are a great match for IoT analytics, so Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and PTC ThingWorx are reviewed in detail next. Geospatial analytics is then introduced as a way to leverage location information. Combining IoT data with environmental data is also discussed as a way to enhance predictive capability. We’ll also review the economics of IoT analytics and you’ll discover ways to optimize business value. By the end of the book, you’ll know how to handle scale for both data storage and analytics, how Apache Spark can be leveraged to handle scalability, and how R and Python can be used for analytic modeling.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 6. Getting to Know Your Data - Exploring IoT Data

"Yes, I know the three-month average is 45.2, but what does it mean? We have over 2 terabytes of data now. But what does it tell us?"

Your boss is in one of his moods again. He is peppering you with questions, and you are not sure how to answer. Your first instinct was to spit back numbers from the weekly reports, but it obviously did not work.

"Is the data even any good?" he continues, "Are we building up value or just cluttering up the basement with junk?"

You start to shrug but wisely stop yourself. You think the data is very valuable, but you actually do not know much about the dataset beyond the numbers that are included in the reports you have been asked to develop. You realize you are not even sure what the individual data records look like. You know that averages can hide a lot of things, but no one has ever asked you to look any deeper.

You straighten your shoulders and say confidently, "There is value in the data. We are just...