Last time we described the simplest class of analytics (i.e. descriptive analytics) that you can use to reduce your big data into much smaller, but consumable bites of information. Remember, most raw data, especially big data, are not suitable for human consumption, but the information we derived from the data is.
Today we will talk about the second class of analytics for data reduction—predictive analytics. First let me clarify 2 subtle points about predictive analytics that is often confusing.
- The purpose of predictive analytics is NOT to tell you what will happen in the future. No analytics can do that.
- Predictive analytics are not limited to the time domain. Some of the most interesting predictive analytics in social media are non-temporal in nature.
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