Generally speaking descriptive analytics is the process of making some sense or adding some structure to a data set, which at times can be very large. For this reason, most discussions referring to “analytics” in business are actually talking about descriptive analytics (Bertolucci, 2013). The most obvious example is when we run descriptive statistics at the beginning of a study, and look at things like the range, mean, median, quartiles, skew and kurtosis.…

In my last blog I introduced us to Hadoop, which allows companies to process, store and analyze Petabytes, Exabytes and even Yottabytes worth of data. And not just the kind of data you’d find on a spreadsheet--Hadoop can handle a wide…

If you still can’t figure out what exactly Hadoop is, don’t worry, you’re not alone. But hopefully this multi-part blog series will help! Hadoop is very difficult to understand if, like most people, you’re gathering bits and pieces of info here and there. And, sorry Wikipedia, but your page isn’t very helpful if you aren’t a…

We now live in a data-immersed society. What used to be a term that was mostly the domain of folks in white lab coats is now thrown around by just about everyone--salespeople, soccer players, surfers, you name it. “How much data do you get in your plan?” “Do you get unlimited data?” So the burning question is, what is data?

Data is basically just raw information about something--anything--in some form that…