Big Data Characteristics

What is Big Data?

Big Data is a term used for a collection of data sets that are large and complex, which is difficult to store and process using available database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenge includes capturing, curating, storing, searching, sharing, transferring, analyzing and visualization of this data

 

The five characteristics that define Big Data are: Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity and Value.

1.      VOLUME

Volume refers to the ‘amount of data’, which is growing day by day at a very fast pace. The size of data generated by humans, machines and their interactions on social media itself is massive. Researchers have predicted that 40 Zettabytes (40,000 Exabytes) will be generated by 2020, which is an increase of 300 times from 2005

 

2.      VELOCITY

Velocity is defined as the pace at which different sources generate the data every day. This flow of data is massive and continuous. There are 1.03 billion Daily Active Users (Facebook DAU) on Mobile as of now, which is an increase of 22% year-over-year. This shows how fast the number of users are growing on social media and how fast the data is getting generated daily. If you are able to handle the velocity, you will be able to generate insights and take decisions based on real-time data.

 

3.      VARIETY

As there are many sources which are contributing to Big Data, the type of data they are generating is different. It can be structured, semi-structured or unstructured. Hence, there is a variety of data which is getting generated every day. Earlier, we used to get the data from excel and databases, now the data are coming in the form of images, audios, videos, sensor data etc. Hence, this variety of unstructured data creates problems in capturing, storage, mining and analyzing the data

 

4.      VERACITY

Veracity refers to the data in doubt or uncertainty of data available due to data inconsistency and incompleteness.

Data available can sometimes get messy and maybe difficult to trust. With many forms of big data, quality and accuracy are difficult to control like Twitter posts with hashtags, abbreviations, typos and colloquial speech. The volume is often the reason behind for the lack of quality and accuracy in the data. 

·         Due to uncertainty of data, 1 in 3 business leaders don’t trust the information they use to make decisions.

·         It was found in a survey that 27% of respondents were unsure of how much of their data was inaccurate.

·         Poor data quality costs the US economy around $3.1 trillion a year.

5.      VALUE

After discussing Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity, there is another V that should be taken into account when looking at Big Data i.e. Value. It is all well and good to have access to big data but unless we can turn it into value it is useless. By turning it into value I mean, Is it adding to the benefits of the organizations who are analyzing big data? Is the organization working on Big Data achieving high ROI (Return On Investment)? Unless, it adds to their profits by working on Big Data, it is useless.