Our daily web presence has given a huge boost to data production. Think about the most common actions performed every day such as a post on Instagram, an online purchase or even just paying at the store with a credit card: all these activities are real “digital footprints” revealing who we are, our interests and consumption, and our habits. These are mostly collected by private companies using them to analyse them for marketing purposes. This is where we started becoming conscious, and steps were taken in several countries to make users more involved and aware of data sharing processes. But there is more than just marketing.
Big data analytics has proven to be extremely important in areas of public interest such as health care, for example in the early diagnosis of diseases, as well as in the optimised management of hospitals or the prediction of possible side effects of drugs on individual patients. And there are many others!
Working with big data means just that. While many data taken individually do not tell us much, relating them together can produce information helping us making very useful predictions.
Find out more in this episode!