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What Is Big Data?

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What is Big Data?
Big data is often referred to and defined in many different ways.In layman terms, we can interpret it as massive or huge amounts of information which cannot be handled efficiently by the current technologies and softwares. But recent technological advancements like data analytics, and social or media networks allow process, transfer, allocate, measure and represent enormous amounts of data which can also be referred to as Big Data.

The way big data is used these days is to gather deep and useful information about people’s behaviour and sentiments. According to Katina Michael and Keith Miller - “Organizations use various analytical techniques— from crowdsourcing to genetic algorithms to neural networks to sentiment
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As per our analysis, gathering and processing data/information from online news and social media could give the agencies a lead time for tackling critical health issues. For instance, during a cholera outbreak in Haiti, the government agencies could have got a lead time of two weeks if they had done proper data mining from online media.
Another major application could be predictive analytics to flag fraudulent payments. The Fraud detection Systems help in reducing the abuse in real-time and has already prevented over $115 million of fraudulent payments in general. The system deployed by The Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services has already saved three times the actual cost invested for the program’s first year.
Big data analytics has always proven useful for defense purposes. According to one of the retrospective analysis, a program called Nexus 7 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) deployed data scientists to the battlefield during the violent years in Afghanistan War. The data mined through surveillance helped in locating and destroying improvised explosive devices.
Another health industry success story was collecting millions of data samples from neonatal intensive care units to determine which newborns were likely to contract potentially fatal infections. Small warnings during analysis detected early signs of infections and thus prevented many
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