Welcome back! Let me just make a quick announcement before I dive into big data. As some of you might know, in 2 weeks,LiNC (Lithium Network Conference) will take place at The Westin St. Franc...
Updated 8 months ago
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Hellow Andrew,
Thx for the comment.
I apologize that I am not aware of the trademark for prescriptive analytics. I was referring to the general class of analytics that prescribes possible course of actions, rather than any proprietary system.
Concerning the real time issue. That should be factored into all analytics (regardless of whether they are descriptive, predictive, or prescriptive) depending on what kind of problem you are trying to solve. Some problems do requires real time data, and others do not. To be realistic, nothing is truly real-time. There is always some delay. Is 1 minute real time enough? is 10 sec delay real time enough? how about 1 second?
A problem that requires real time data is like location based recommendation of restaurants when you are traveling to a new place you never been to before. But if you are trying to predict what books I would buy next, then you don't really need real time data. Amazon's recommendation system is a good example of that. You can use historical data to get a pretty good (or at least good enough) recommendation. You probably don't want to use data that is more than 5 years old, b/c people's reading interest do change, but they don't change from day to day, it's more like on the order of many months to years.
In my oppinion, real time is somewhat overrated. It does, however, represent a class of inference that we cannot perform previously. So it is rather new, and as a result, there is much hype with this new tool as with anything else. But as big data technology are married to sophisticated analytics and machine learning, near real-time might become possible and may be even commoditized one day. Then real-time vs long historical analysis will be on an even plain. Then people will start to realize that there are value and place for both. Wikipedia is a great example for knowledge that doesn't change much.
You are right that, there are definitely plenty of great use cases in health care, government, and defense. And definitely the internet of things will add a whole new dimension to data, b/c interaction not only can happen between humans, but between human and things, and among things.
Thx for the interesting discussion.
These are great points you raised. And I hope to see you again next time.