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

Exploring and visualizing data


The first step in any analytics, especially IoT analytics, is getting to know your data. Like a future spouse, you need to know everything you can about it. Know its flaws and its strong points. Know which attributes can be annoying and make sure you are able to live with them. Get to know its future earning potential. And find all this out before it is too late and you are bound to it.

In this chapter, we will use a couple of tools to quickly learn quite a bit about a sample dataset. Examples will follow along with methods to dive into the data in order to find its strengths and weaknesses. For exploration and visualization, we will use Tableau. For more statistical evaluations, we will use the statistical programming language R.

The Tableau overview

Tableau is a business intelligence and analytics software tool that allows you to connect to dozens of different database and file types, drag and drop to build visualizations, and easily share them with others....