Goals: The goal of this assignment was to give us an outlet to display our ability to understand and describe an aspect of data analytics to current and future employers. From the possible topics to discuss, I chose “Big Data’.
Results: As a result of this class project, I learned just how relevant Big Data is in our day-to-day life. Big Data is mostly known as extremely large amounts of data/information that has been “pulled” or “saved”. I also learned that people and companies can use different methods of analysis to sift through the data, and use the data in multiple different ways; for understanding the present, and trying to predict the future.
I learned that we see Big Data in everyday life when we go to a store and they ask us for our phone numbers for our loyalty. This information is used to sift through this company’s customer data and patterns to learn “who does what and why” and they use this information to their advantage. Data that is tracked like this can be used to understand the present, but more importantly, plan and predict for the future. This is how people predict who will win the next presidential election, stages of climate change, and how to approach customers in your store around the holidays versus any regular day, and so much more. Beyond the data being used for information analysis, the next big question is, where is my data going? Big Data is so much more than just information being stored.