What is Big Data Analytics?

Big data analytics examines and analyzes large and complex data sets known as “big data.”

Through this analysis, you can uncover valuable insights, patterns, and trends to make more informed decisions. It uses several techniques, tools, and technologies to process, manage, and examine meaningful information from massive datasets.

We typically apply big data analytics when data is too large or complicated for traditional data processing methods to handle efficiently. The more information there is, the greater the need for diverse analytical approaches, quicker handling times, and a more extensive data capacity.

Big data analytics combines several stages and processes to extract insights.

Here’s a quick overview of what this could look like:

1. Data collection: Gather data from various sources, such as surveys, social media, websites, databases, and transaction records. This data can be structured, unstructured, or semi-structured.
2. Data storage: Store data in distributed systems or cloud-based solutions. These types of storage can handle a large volume of data and provide fault tolerance.
3. Data preprocessing: It’s best to clean and preprocess the raw data before performing analysis. This process could involve handling missing values, standardizing formats, addressing outliers, and structuring the data into a more suitable format.
4. Data integration: Data usually comes from various sources in different formats. Data integration combines the data into a unified format.
5. Data processing: Most organizations benefit from using distributed frameworks to process big data. These break down the tasks into smaller chunks and distribute them across multiple machines for parallel processing.
6. Data analysis techniques: Depending on the goal of the analysis, you’ll likely apply several data analysis techniques. These could include descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics using machine learning, text mining, exploratory analysis, and other methods.
7. Data visualization: After analysis, communicate the results visually, like charts, graphs, dashboards, or other visual tools. Visualization helps you communicate complex insights in an understandable and accessible way.
8. Interpretation and decision making: Interpret the insights gained from your analysis to draw conclusions and make data-backed decisions. These decisions impact business strategies, processes, and operations.
9. Feedback and scale: One of the main advantages of big data analytics frameworks is their ability to scale horizontally. This scalability enables you to handle increasing data volumes and maintain performance, so you have a sustainable method for analyzing large datasets.

It’s important to remember that big data analytics isn’t a linear process, but a cycle.

You’ll continually gather new data, analyze it, and refine business strategies based on the results. The whole process is iterative, which means adapting to changes and making adjustments is key.

Big data analytics has the potential to transform the way you operate, make decisions, and innovate. It’s an ideal solution if you’re dealing with massive datasets and are having difficulty choosing a suitable analytical approach.

By tapping into the finer details of your information, using techniques and specific tools, you can use your data as a strategic asset.

Big data analytics enables you to benefit from:

• Informed decision-making: You can make informed decisions based on actual data, which reduces uncertainty and improves outcomes.
• Business insights: Analyzing large datasets uncovers hidden patterns and trends, providing a deeper understanding of customer behavior and market dynamics.
• Customer understanding: Get insight into customer preferences and needs so you can personalize experiences and create more impactful marketing strategies.
• Operational efficiency: By analyzing operational data, you can optimize processes, identify bottlenecks, and streamline operations to reduce costs and improve productivity.
• Innovation: Big data analytics can help you uncover new opportunities and niches within industries. You can identify unmet needs and emerging trends to develop more innovative products and services to stay ahead of the competition.

There are four main types of big data analytics—descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. Each serves a different purpose and offers varying levels of insight.

Collectively, they enable businesses to comprehensively understand their big data and make decisions to drive improved performance.

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Descriptive analytics

This type focuses on summarizing historical data to tell youwhat’s happened in the past. It uses aggregation, data mining, and visualization techniques to understand trends, patterns, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Descriptive analytics helps you understand your current situation and make informed decisions based on historical information.

Diagnostic analytics

Diagnostic analytics goes beyond describing past events and aims to understand why they occurred. It separates data to identify the root causes of specific outcomes or issues.

By analyzing relationships and correlations within the data, diagnostic analytics helps you gain insights into factors influencing your results.

Predictive analytics

This type of analytics uses historical data and statistical algorithms to predict future events. It spots patterns and trends and forecasts what might happen next.

You can use predictive analytics to anticipate customer behavior, product demand, market trends, and more to plan and make strategic decisions proactively.

Prescriptive analytics

Prescriptive analytics builds on predictive analytics by recommending actions to optimize future outcomes. It considers various possible actions and their potential impact on the predicted event or outcome.

Prescriptive analytics help you make data-driven decisions by suggesting the best course of action based on your desired goals and any constraints.

Big data analytics has become a clear business game changer by unlocking insights and opportunities.

Below we’ve highlighted some of the tangible benefits of this transformative approach.

Improved risk management

Big data encompasses massive data volumes from diverse sources, including real-time streams. Rapid analysis helps detect anomalies or unusual patterns quickly, preventing risks like fraud or security breaches that can have widespread and immediate consequences.

Example: Banks use big data analytics to spot unusual spending patterns in real-time, helping prevent fraudulent credit card transactions and safeguarding customer accounts.

Cost-efficiency

Big data analytics can process and analyze extensive datasets, including handling large-scale data streams from sources like IoT devices or social media in real time.

This comprehensive analysis enables you to optimize your operations, identify inefficiencies, and reduce costs at a level that might not be achievable with smaller datasets.

Example: Big data analytics optimizes production in manufacturing by analyzing data from sensors on the factory floor, reducing downtime and minimizing maintenance costs.

Better decision making

Applying big data analytics provides deeper insights, as it can analyze diverse and unstructured data types.

You can use it to analyze everything from structured databases to unstructured text and multimedia content. This variety of data sources enables richer insights into customer behavior, market trends, and other critical factors, helping you make more informed and strategic decisions.

Example: An ecommerce platform uses big data analytics to analyze customer browsing behavior and purchase history. This enables personalized recommendations to help improve customer satisfaction and drive sales.

Deeper insights

Big data analytics extracts insights from vast and diverse datasets. This includes structured and unstructured data, making it better at revealing nuanced patterns and hidden relationships.

By delving into massive datasets, big data analytics can uncover insights that have a transformative impact on business strategies and operations.

Example: A healthcare provider uses big data analytics to explore patient data, clinical research, and external sources to find personalized treatment options for complex medical conditions.

Big data analytics has immense potential, but has its share of hurdles.

You may encounter some of these challenges, so it’s important to recognize and understand how to overcome them.

Here are a few to look out for.

Making data accessible and organized

Handling large and diverse datasets can make organizing and accessing information challenging.

We recommend a cohesive data infrastructure that enables easy retrieval and integration for practical analysis.

Maintaining quality

The sheer volume and variety of data can lead to inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

Ensuring data quality through cleaning, validation, and proper data governance helps prevent incorrect analysis and decision-making.

Keeping data secure

Maintaining data security is a major concern given the large volume of sensitive information collected and analyzed.

Safeguarding data against breaches, unauthorized access, and cyber threats protects customer privacy and business integrity.

Finding the right tools

The rapidly evolving landscape of big data tools and technologies can be overwhelming.

We recommend using a buying committee of internal stakeholders to evaluate tools that integrate well together and match your business needs and goals.

Real-world applications of big data analytics have ignited shifts and shaped approaches across several industries.

We’ll explore some examples and highlight how this methodology helps decision-making and innovation in many business sectors.

Healthcare

In healthcare, big data analytics processes vast volumes of patient records, medical images, and genomic data.

It identifies intricate patterns in large datasets to predict disease trends, enhance personalized treatments, and even anticipate potential outbreaks by analyzing global health data.

Product development

Big data analytics facilitates product development by analyzing structured data like sales records and unstructured data like customer reviews and social media interactions.

This enables companies to uncover hidden insights about customer preferences to produce more innovative and targeted products.

Media and entertainment

Big data analytics helps the media and entertainment industry by dissecting streams of viewership data and social media interactions.

These techniques unravel real-time trends, helping media companies rapidly adapt their content offerings, optimize ad placement, and personalize recommendations for diverse audiences.

Marketing

Marketing companies can benefit from big data analytics in several ways. Unlike smaller-scale analytical approaches, it can analyze intricate customer behavior across various channels and dissect complex patterns in real time.

Marketers can offer highly personalized experiences, detect shifting trends faster, and responsively adjust their strategies.

Ecommerce

Big data analytics in ecommerce is more than simple sales analysis. It dives into vast and diverse datasets, including clickstream data, purchase histories, and online interactions.

It enables real-time recommendations, dynamic pricing adjustments, and enhanced supply chain management for a seamless customer experience.

Banking

In the banking sector, big data analytics doesn’t only focus on transaction monitoring.

It processes enormous amounts of transaction data in real time, using advanced algorithms and machine learning to find unusual patterns and behavior. In doing so, big data analytics helps banks reduce false positives and provide more accurate fraud signals than other methods.

There are many techniques in the big data analytics toolbox and you'll likely come across many as you dissect and analyze your information.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, these are foundational techniques for handling big data.

• Association Rule Learning: Used to find relationships or patterns in large datasets. It’s primarily applied in market basket analysis, where the goal is to discover associations between items frequently purchased together.
• Classification Tree Analysis: Used for predictive modeling and classification tasks. They partition the dataset into subsets based on input features and then assign a class label to each one. Decision trees are one type of classification tree.
• Genetic Algorithms: An optimization technique inspired by natural selection. This involves creating a population of potential solutions and evolving them over generations to find the best one. You can use genetic algorithms for various optimization problems, including feature selection, parameter tuning, etc.
• Machine Learning: This covers various techniques in which algorithms learn patterns from data and make predictions or decisions. It includes supervised learning where models are trained on labeled data, unsupervised learning where patterns are inferred from unlabeled data, and reinforcement learning where they learn to make decisions based on rewards or punishments.
• Clustering: An unsupervised learning technique in which data points are grouped into clusters based on similarity. It’s mostly used for customer segmentation and anomaly detection.
• Regression Analysis: Models the relationship between dependent and independent variables. It’s commonly used for predicting numerical values, such as sales based on advertising costs.
• Neural Networks: A class of machine learning models inspired by the brain’s structure. They consist of interconnected nodes—known as neurons—organized into layers. Deep learning is a subset of neural networks involving multiple hidden layers. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used to analyze images, while Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are used for sequence data.
• Text Mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP): Focused on processing and understanding human language, these are used for sentiment analysis, topic modeling, language generation, and more.
• Dimensionality Reduction: These techniques reduce the number of input features while preserving essential information. They help with visualization, noise reduction, and speeding up training.
• Time Series Analysis: Used to analyze data points collected over time for forecasting, anomaly detection, and trend analysis.

From healthcare to marketing, big data analytics offers a lens into the intricate workings of our interconnected world.

It empowers you to navigate complexities, spot trends that elude the naked eye, and transform data into actionable strategies that drive growth.

As the business landscape evolves, so does the scope and impact of big data analytics—this is where Amplitude Analytics can help.

Amplitude Analytics bridges the gap between raw data and meaningful insights, guiding you toward a deeper understanding of your user’s journey.

As an all-in-one data analytics platform, it applies all four types of big data analytics—predictive, prescriptive, descriptive, and diagnostic—-to help you garner insights across all areas of your business. You’ll be able to analyze your data and truly decipher the stories and potential it holds.

Enhance your product, engage your customers, and make data-backed decisions that resonate.

Get started with Amplitude Analytics today.

Other Analytics Guides

• What is Enterprise Analytics?
• What is Predictive Analytics?
• What is Diagnostic Analytics?
• What is Descriptive Analytics?
• What is Prescriptive Analytics?