Graphs are everywhere, used by everyone, for everything. Neo4j is one of the most popular graph database that can be used to make recommendations, get social, find paths, uncover fraud, manage networks, and so on. A graph database can store any kind of data using a Nodes (graph data records), Relationships (connect nodes), and Properties (named data values).

A graph database can be used for connected data which is otherwise not possible with either relational or other NOSQL databases…

In this blog post I summarize my current findings in the Zipf's law clustering process.

I have done some extensive simulations on clustering of entities, which should lead to Zipf's law..

To summarize the simulated clustering process (which complies to the guidelines dr. Granville provided in his post):…

The "Big Data" marketing hype obscures the fact that more actionable, valuable insights are likely to be found in the right smaller "Smart Data" sets in contrast to large data sets.



While the term "Big Data" is properly defined as data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time - the…

Not long ago, bring your own device (BYOD) was the trend to watch among enterprises. Companies of all shapes and sizes looked at BYOD as the next big thing in business, a way to make…

The full version is always published Monday. Starred articles or sections are new additions or updated content, posted between Thursday and Sunday. 

Sponsored Announcement…

The Naked analyst Episode 9 looks at the best places for analytic competitions.

Here are my top 4 sites. They range from the the well known to some more specialist sites. There are 3 marketplaces I know of, and a 'world championship' currently running.

Kaggle

Kaggle is the world's largest community of data scientists. They compete with…

Defining big data is now a hot topic. Berkeley University posted 40 very short definitions by thought leaders (including me). Here our goal is to offer a very detailed, comprehensive definition that (hopefully) suits everyone.

First, there are three…

This analysis shows the distribution of data scientists per country, city, gender and company. It is based on Data Science Central (DSC) member database, only including members who provided information regarding these fields, on sign-up. Not all members provide information about their location, company or gender. A small majority does, and these members tend to be over-represented in US. Differences with our…

The real estate industry has long operated according to its own traditions, but the availability of huge volumes of data is revolutionizing the way the industry works.…

Is analytics yet another fad? Is there much more talk about it than real solid action. It does seem so when you look around you as a consumer.

Marketers still don’t care, as much, about being relevant to you. You get that umpteenth credit card solicitation from the bank which has already sold you a card. And nothing about a physical Retailer shopping experience makes it personal for you!

And yet your online…

The idea of environmental determinism once made a lot of sense. Hostile climates and habitats prevented the expansion of human populations. The conceptual opposite of determinism is called possibilism. These days, human populations can found living in many inhospitable habitats. This isn't because humans have physically evolved. But rather, we normally occupy built-environments. We exist through our technologies and advanced forms of social interaction: a person might not be able to build a…

With the development and growth of ecommerce platforms like Shopify, the number of small- and medium- sized ecommerce businesses is growing at an impressive rate. But, with this growth comes a growth in market opportunities for the online villains and fraudsters out there who are looking to make a quick buck. It used to be that only huge corporations had the resources they needed to detect fraud and protect themselves from its damages. But, in this era of big data and…

The "big data" technology vendor market is ripe for consolidation. The myriad of vendors and technologies is causing market confusion. Matt Turck created a nice visualization entitled "…

Summary:  Graph databases are your go-to choice when a relationship among the data items is key.

Up to about 1999 web search…

Summary:  Column Oriented DBs excel at OLAP and are efficient at partial updates.

Many folks believe that Hadoop is the…

Game mechanics help penetrate the walls that consumers have erected to filter out the deluge of information that increasingly clutters their digital space.

Gamification: The rumbling concept

Gamification is a buzzword that has crept into all industry verticals in the recent years –…

The full version is always published Monday. Starred articles or sections are new additions or updated content, posted between Thursday and Sunday. 

Featured

• Big Data Technology Vendor Consolidation *…

This data puzzle was originally posted on my blog, The Well-Tempered Spreadsheet.  In a Data Science Central article, Kirk Borne cited the puzzle as an example of a data relationship that eludes many data discovery…

Summary:  Unless you have special needs Document Oriented DBs are your most likely default choice.

Second in popularity in the business world behind Key-Value-Stores are Document Oriented Databases. …