Big Data and Visualization: The Ham and Eggs of Analysis

October 14, 2016

i read “Big Data Is Useless without Visual Analytics.” (Nope, I won’t comment on the fact that “data” is a plural.) The main point of the article is that looking at a table is not as easy as looking at a graphic, preferably Hollywood style, presentation ready visualizations. If you want to see a nifty visualization, check out the Dark Trace three dimensional, real time visualizations.

The write up informed me:

Visualizations are valuable because they display a lot of data in an easy-to-understand visual format that works well for our visually-oriented minds.

Okay. A lot. Good.

I learned that “data mining is too complicated for most uses of Big Data.”

No kidding. Understanding and making justifiable decisions about data validity, math with funny symbols, and numerical recipes which make the numbers conform to the silliness taught in university statistics classes. These are difficult tasks for avid Facebook users and YouTube content consumers to deal with.

I understand. Some folks are just really busy.

The write up explains that Excel is not the proper tool for real information analysis. Never mind that Excel remains a reasonably popular chunk of software. Some Excel lovers write memos and reports in Excel. That’s software love.

So what’s the fix?

Surprisingly the write up does not provide one. But there is a link which allows me to download a report from my pals at IDC. You remember IDC, right? That is the outfit which tried to sell my content on Amazon without my permission and without having a agreement with me to publish my research. If you have forgotten what I call the “Schubmehl play”, you can get some of the details at this link.

Nice write up. Too bad it lacks useful content on the subject presented in the headline. But what else does one expect these days?

Stephen E Arnold, October 14, 2016

Comments

One Response to “Big Data and Visualization: The Ham and Eggs of Analysis”

  1. Mihai Paunescu on October 16th, 2016 10:17 am

    Dear Mr. Arnold,
    I am sure that this is not new for you but please remember that most outfits providing reports on market trends are “for profit” organization. The fact that they do not publicly display a specific brand for data mining / visualization in the article, does not imply that there is not support for some 🙂
    Articles like this are well covered suggestions to “start buying data mining solutions with visualization features”. It is written between the lines 🙂
    Kind regards,
    MP

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