Data Science, Data Analysis
The October 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review prominently features the words “Getting Control of Big Data” on the cover, and the magazine includes these three related articles: 1. “Big Data: The Management Revolution,” by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, pages 61 – 68; 2. “Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century,” by Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil pages 70 – 76; 3. “Making Advanced Analytics Work For You,” by Dominic Barton and David Court, pages 79 – 83. All three provide food for thought; this post presents a brief summary of some of those thoughts. One point made in the first article is that the “size” of a dataset – i.e., what constitutes “Big Data” – can be measured in at least three very different ways: volume, velocity, and variety. All of these aspects of the Big Data characterization problem affects it, but differently: 1. For very large data volumes, one fundamental issue is the incomprehensibility of the raw data itse