Tag Archives: Big Data

Data Insights for Everyone — The Semantic Layer to the Rescue

What is a semantic layer? That’s a good question, but let’s first explain semantics. The way that I explained it to my data science students years ago was like this. In the early days of web search engines, those engines were primarily keyword search engines. If you knew the right keywords to search and if the content providers also used the same keywords on their website, then you could type the words into your favorite search engine and find the content you needed. So, I asked my students what results they would expect from such a search engine if I typed the following words into the search box: “How many cows are there in Texas?” My students were smart. They realized that the search results would probably not provide an answer to my question, but the results would simply list websites that included my words on the page or in the metadata tags: “Texas”, “Cows”, “How”, etc. Then, I explained to my students that a semantic-enabled search engine (with a semantic meta-layer, including ontologies and similar semantic tools) would be able to interpret my question’s meaning and then map that meaning to websites that can answer the question.

This was a good opening for my students to the wonderful world of semantics. I brought them deeper into the world by pointing out how much more effective and efficient the data professionals’ life would be if our data repositories had a similar semantic meta-layer. We would be able to go far beyond searching for correctly spelled column headings in databases or specific keywords in data documentation, to find the data we needed (assuming we even knew the correct labels, metatags, and keywords used by the dataset creators). We could search for data with common business terminology, regardless of the specific choice or spelling of the data descriptors in the dataset. Even more than that, we could easily start discovering and integrating, on-the-fly, data from totally different datasets that used different descriptors. For example, if I am searching for customer sales numbers, different datasets may label that “sales”, or “revenue”, or “customer_sales”, or “Cust_sales”, or any number of other such unique identifiers. What a nightmare that would be! But what a dream the semantic layer becomes!

When I was teaching those students so many years ago, the semantic layer itself was just a dream. Now it is a reality. We can now achieve the benefits, efficiencies, and data superhero powers that we previously could only imagine. But wait! There’s more.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the semantic layer is to provide different data professionals with easy access to the data needed for their specific roles and tasks. The semantic layer is the representation of data that helps different business end-users discover and access the right data efficiently, effectively, and effortlessly using common business terms. The data scientists need to find the right data as inputs for their models — they also need a place to write-back the outputs of their models to the data repository for other users to access. The BI (business intelligence) analysts need to find the right data for their visualization packages, business questions, and decision support tools — they also need the outputs from the data scientists’ models, such as forecasts, alerts, classifications, and more. The semantic layer achieves this by mapping heterogeneously labeled data into familiar business terms, providing a unified, consolidated view of data across the enterprise.

The semantic layer delivers data insights discovery and usability across the whole enterprise, with each business user empowered to use the terminology and tools that are specific to their role. How data are stored, labeled, and meta-tagged in the data cloud is no longer a bottleneck to discovery and access. The decision-makers and data science modelers can fluidly share inputs and outputs with one another, to inform their role-specific tasks and improve their effectiveness. The semantic layer takes the user-specific results out of being a “one-off” solution on that user’s laptop to becoming an enterprise analytics accelerant, enabling business answer discovery at the speed of business questions.

Insights discovery for everyone is achieved. The semantic layer becomes the arbiter (multi-lingual data translator) for insights discovery between and among all business users of data, within the tools that they are already using. The data science team may be focused on feature importance metrics, feature engineering, predictive modeling, model explainability, and model monitoring. The BI team may be focused on KPIs, forecasts, trends, and decision-support insights. The data science team needs to know and to use that data which the BI team considers to be most important. The BI team needs to know and to use which trends, patterns, segments, and anomalies are being found in those data by the data science team. Sharing and integrating such important data streams has never been such a dream.

The semantic layer bridges the gaps between the data cloud, the decision-makers, and the data science modelers. The key results from the data science modelers can be written back to the semantic layer, to be sent directly to consumers of those results in the executive suite and on the BI team. Data scientists can focus on their tools; the BI users and executives can focus on their tools; and the data engineers can focus on their tools. The enterprise data science, analytics, and BI functions have never been so enterprisey. (Is “enterprisey” a word? I don’t know, but I’m sure you get my semantic meaning.)

That’s empowering. That’s data democratization. That’s insights democratization. That’s data fluency/literacy-building across the enterprise. That’s enterprise-wide agile curiosity, question-asking, hypothesizing, testing/experimenting, and continuous learning. That’s data insights for everyone.

Are you ready to learn more how you can bring these advantages to your organization? Be sure to watch the AtScale webinar “How to Bridge Data Science and Business Intelligence” where I join a panel in a multi-industry discussion on how a semantic layer can help organizations make smarter data-driven decisions at scale. There will be several speakers, including me. I will be speaking about “Model Monitoring in the Enterprise — Filling the Gaps”, specifically focused on “Filling the Communication Gaps Between BI and Data Science Teams With a Semantic Data Layer.”

Register to attend and view the webinar at https://bit.ly/3ySVIiu.

https://bit.ly/3ySVIiu

Data Science Blogs-R-Us

[UPDATED December 31, 2022]

I have written articles in many places. I will be collecting links to those sources here. The list is not complete and will be constantly evolving. There are some older blogs that I will be including in the list below as I remember them and find them. Also included are some interviews in which I provided detailed answers to a variety of questions.

In 2019, I was listed as the #1 Top Data Science Blogger to Follow on Twitter.

And then there’s this — not a blog, but a link to my 2013 TedX talk: “Big Data, Small World.” (Many more videos of my talks are available online. That list will be compiled in another place soon.)

  1. Rocket-Powered Data Science (the website that you are now reading).
  2. https://medium.com/@kirk.borne
  3. https://www.the-yuan.com/search.html (Search for “Kirk Borne” blogs)
  4. https://www.datasciencecentral.com/author/kirkborne/
  5. https://medium.com/@relx/ai-adoption-in-2021-driven-by-many-external-factors-af5b848cee33
  6. https://muckrack.com/kirk-borne/articles
  7. https://www.govloop.com/author/kirkdborne/
  8. https://datamakespossible.westerndigital.com/tag/kirk-borne/
  9. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkdborne/detail/recent-activity/posts/
  10. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-go-from-data-paradox-productivity-business-kirk-borne-ph-d-/
  11. https://blog.starburst.io/author/kirk-borne
  12. https://www.oreilly.com/people/kirk-borne/
  13. https://www.syntasa.com/blog/author/kirk-borne
  14. https://mapr.com/blog/author/kirk-borne/
  15. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bult.2013.1720390414
  16. https://www.thedatadreamer.com/insights/talk-the-walk-the-importance-of-fluency-in-data-storytelling/
  17. https://www.futureofbusinessandtech.com/business-ai/leveraging-artificial-intelligence-for-social-good/
  18. https://mindsdb.com/blog/predictions-at-the-speed-of-questions/?utm_source=kirk&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=wb
  19. https://blog.qlik.com/how-we-teach-the-leaders-of-tomorrow-to-be-curious-ask-questions-and-not-be-afraid-to-fail-fast-to-learn-fast
  20. https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/blog/kirk-borne-on-building-data-science-models.html
  21. https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/blog/the-power-of-data-science-and-ai-for-social-good.html
  22. https://odsc.com/blog/adapting-machine-learning-algorithms-to-novel-use-cases/
  23. https://www.kdnuggets.com/2019/01/data-scientist-dilemma-cold-start-machine-learning.html
  24. https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/articles/analytics/data-scientist-data-literacy.html
  25. https://blogs.sas.com/content/sascom/2019/04/27/getting-practical-about-ai-with-kirk-borne/
  26. https://blogs.sas.com/content/sascom/2017/08/31/3-machine-learning-technologies-3-three-years/
  27. https://www.digitalistmag.com/future-of-work/2019/05/15/intelligent-enterprise-connecting-islands-of-innovation-06198471
  28. https://www.digitalistmag.com/cio-knowledge/2019/06/27/data-strategy-that-first-date-with-your-data-06199224
  29. https://blogs.oracle.com/author/kirk-borne
  30. https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/doing-better-at-your-service-with-ai-as-a-service/
  31. https://www.aitimejournal.com/data-science-interview-with-kirk-borne-principal-data-scientist-booz-allen-hamilton
  32. https://insideanalysis.com/author/kirk-borne/
  33. http://researcher123.blogspot.com/2014/
  34. https://www.manthan.com/blogs/nrf-interview-with-kirk-borne-big-data-hype-the-worst-is-behind-us/
  35. https://www.thinkful.com/blog/meet-the-experts-dr-kirk-borne/
  36. https://itpeernetwork.intel.com/author/kirkborne/#gs.6zd0x8
  37. https://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/author/kirk-borne
  38. https://www.laserfiche.com/ecmblog/3-questions-kirk-borne-about-big-data/

Glossaries of Data Science Terminology

Here is a compilation of glossaries of terminology used in data science, big data analytics, machine learning, AI, and related fields:

Data Science Glossary

A tag cloud of data science and machine learning terminology

Data Science Training Opportunities

A few years ago, I generated a list of places to receive data science training. That list has become a bit stale. So, I have updated the list, adding some new opportunities, keeping many of the previous ones, and removing the obsolete ones.

Also, here is a thorough, informative, and interesting article that outlines the critical skills needed in order to be a good data scientist: https://www.toptal.com/data-science#hiring-guide

Here are 30 training opportunities that I encourage you to explore:

  1. The Booz Allen Field Guide to Data Science
  2. NYC Data Science Academy
  3. NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute
  4. Metis Data Science Training
  5. Leada’s online analytics labs
  6. Data Science Training by General Assembly
  7. Learn Data Science Online by DataCamp
  8. (600+) Colleges and Universities with Data Science Degrees
  9. Data Science Master’s Degree Programs
  10. Data Analytics, Machine Learning, & Statistics Courses at edX
  11. Data Science Certifications (by AnalyticsVidhya)
  12. Learn Everything About Analytics (by AnalyticsVidhya)
  13. Big Bang Data Science Solutions
  14. CommonLounge
  15. IntelliPaat Online Training
  16. DataQuest
  17. NCSU Institute for Advanced Analytics
  18. District Data Labs
  19. Data School
  20. Galvanize
  21. Coursera
  22. Udacity Nanodegree Program to Become a Data Scientist
  23. Udemy – Data & Analytics
  24. Insight Data Science Fellows Program
  25. The Open Source Data Science Masters
  26. Jigsaw Academy Post Graduate Program in Data Science & Machine Learning
  27. O’Reilly Media Learning Paths
  28. Data Engineering and Data Science Training by Go Data Driven
  29. 18 Resources to Learn Data Science Online (by Simplilearn)
  30. Top Online Data Science Courses to Learn Data Science

Follow Kirk Borne on Twitter @KirkDBorne

Field Guide to Data Science
Learn the what, why, and how of Data Science and Machine Learning here.

Bias-Busting with Diversity in Data

Diversity in data is one of the three defining characteristics of big data — high data variety — along with high data volume and high velocity. We discussed the power and value of high-variety data in a previous article: “The Five Important D’s of Big Data Variety” We won’t repeat those lessons here, but we focus specifically on the bias-busting power of high-variety data, which was actually the last of the five D’s mentioned in the earlier article: Decreased model bias.

Here, we broaden our meaning of “bias” to go beyond model bias, which has the technical statistical meaning of “underfitting”, which essentially means that there is more information and structure in the data than our model has captured. In the current context, we apply a broader definition of bias: lacking a neutral viewpoint, or having a viewpoint that is partial. We will call this natural bias, since the examples can be considered as “naturally occurring” without obvious intent. This article does not elaborate on personal bias (which might be intentional), though the cause for that kind of prejudice is essentially the same: not considering and taking into account the full knowledge and understanding of the person or entity that is the subject of the bias.

We wrote a longer complete version of this article here: “Busting Bias with More Data Variety” at the Western Digital DataMakesPossible.com blog site.

In that full version of this article, we go on to describe several examples of natural bias and then to present a recommended bias-busting remedy for those of us working in the realm of data science. We refer to that remedy as the CCDI data & analytics strategy: Collect, Curate, Differentiate, and Innovate.

Here is one of the four examples of natural bias that you will find in the longer, complete version of the article:

  • An example of natural bias comes from a famous cartoon. The cartoon shows three or more blind men (or blindfolded men) feeling an elephant. They each feel a different aspect of the elephant: the tail, a tusk, an ear, the body, a leg — and consequently they each offer a different interpretation of what they believe this thing is (which they cannot see). They say it might be a rope (the tail), or a spear (the tusk), or a large fan (the ear), or a wall (the body), or a tree trunk (the leg). Only after the blindfolds are removed (or an explanation is given) do they finally “see” the full truth of this large complex reality. It has many different features, facets, and characteristics. Focusing on only one of those features and insisting that this partial view describes the whole thing would be foolish. We have similar complex systems in our organizations, whether it is the human body (in healthcare), or our population of customers (in marketing), or the Earth (in climate science), or different components in a complex system (like a manufacturing facility), or our students (in a classroom), or whatever. Unless we break down the silos and start sharing our data (insights) about all the dimensions, viewpoints, and perspectives of our complex system, we will consequently be drawn into biased conclusions and actions, and thus miss the key insights that enable us to understand the wonderful complexity and diversity of the thing in its entirety. Integrating the many data sources enables us to arrive at the “single correct view” of the thing: the 360 view!
Collecting high-variety data from diverse sources, connecting the dots, and building the 360 view of our domain is not only the data silo-busting thing to do. It is also the bias-busting thing to do. High-variety data makes that possible, and there is no shortage of biases for high-variety data to bust, including cognitive bias, confirmation bias, salience bias, and sampling bias, just to name a few! …
Read the full story here… “Busting Bias with More Data Variety

Data Scientist’s Dilemma – The Cold Start Problem

The ancient philosopher Confucius has been credited with saying “study your past to know your future.” This wisdom applies not only to life but to machine learning also. Specifically, the availability and application of labeled data (things past) for the labeling of previously unseen data (things future) is fundamental to supervised machine learning.

Without labels (diagnoses, classes, known outcomes) in past data, then how do we make progress in labeling (explaining) future data? This would be a problem.

A related problem also arises in unsupervised machine learning. In these applications, there is no requirement or presumption regarding the existence of labeled training data — we are essentially parameterizing or characterizing the patterns in the data (e.g., the trends, correlations, segments, clusters, associations).

Many unsupervised learning models can converge more readily and be more valuable if we know in advance which parameterizations are best to choose. If we cannot know that (i.e., because it truly is unsupervised learning), then we would like to know at least that our final model is optimal (in some way) in explaining the data.

In both of these applications (supervised and unsupervised machine learning), if we don’t have these initial insights and validation metrics, then how does such model-building get started and get moving towards the optimal solution?

This challenge is known as the cold-start problem! The solution to the problem is easy (sort of): We make a guess — an initial guess! Usually, that would be a totally random guess.

That sounds so… so… random! How do we know whether it’s a good initial guess? How do we progress our model (parameterizations) from that random initial choice? How do we know that our progression is moving towards more accurate models? How? How? How?

This can be a real challenge. Of course nobody said the “cold start” problem would be easy. Anyone who has ever tried to start a very cold car on a frozen morning knows the pain of a cold start challenge. Nothing can be more frustrating on such a morning. But, nothing can be more exhilarating and uplifting on such a morning than that moment when the engine starts and the car begins moving forward with increasing performance.

The experiences for data scientists who face cold-start problems in machine learning can be very similar to those, especially the excitement when our models begin moving forward with increasing performance.

We will itemize several examples at the end. But before we do that, let’s address the objective function. That is the true key that unlocks performance in a cold-start challenge.  That’s the magic ingredient in most of the examples that we will list.

The objective function (also known as cost function, or benefit function) provides an objective measure of model performance. It might be as simple as the percentage of class labels that the model got right (in a classification model), or the sum of the squares of the deviations of the points from the model curve (in a regression model), or the compactness of the clusters relative to their separation (in a clustering analysis).

The value of the objective function is not only in its final value (i.e., giving us a quantitative overall model performance rating), but its great (perhaps greatest) value is realized in guiding our progression from the initial random model (cold-start zero point) to that final successful (hopefully, optimal) model. In those intermediate steps it serves as an evaluation (or validation) metric.

By measuring the evaluation metric at step zero (cold-start), then measuring it again after making adjustments to the model parameters, we learn whether our adjustments led to a better performing model or worse performance. We then know whether to continue making model parameter adjustments in the same direction or in the opposite direction. This is called gradient descent.

Gradient descent methods basically find the slope (i.e., the gradient) of the performance error curve as we progress from one model to the next. As we learned in grade school algebra class, we need two points to find the slope of a curve. Therefore, it is only after we have run and evaluated two models that we will have two performance points — the slope of the curve at the latest point then informs our next choice of model parameter adjustments: either (a) keep adjusting in the same direction as the previous step (if the performance error decreased) to continue descending the error curve; or (b) adjust in the opposite direction (if the performance error increased) to turn around and start descending the error curve.

Note that hill-climbing is the opposite of gradient descent, but essentially the same thing. Instead of minimizing error (a cost function), hill-climbing focuses on maximizing accuracy (a benefit function). Again, we measure the slope of the performance curve from two models, then proceed in the direction of better-performing models. In both cases (hill-climbing and gradient descent), we hope to reach an optimal point (maximum accuracy or minimum error), and then declare that to be the best solution. And that is amazing and satisfying when we remember that we started (as a cold-start) with an initial random guess at the solution.

When our machine learning model has many parameters (which could be thousands for a deep neural network), the calculations are more complex (perhaps involving a multi-dimensional gradient calculation, known as a tensor). But the principle is the same: quantitatively discover at each step in the model-building progression which adjustments (size and direction) are needed in each one of the model parameters in order to progress towards the optimal value of the objective function (e.g., minimize errors, maximize accuracy, maximize goodness of fit, maximize precision, minimize false positives, etc.). In deep learning, as in typical neural network models, the method by which those adjustments to the model parameters are estimated (i.e., for each of the edge weights between the network nodes) is called backpropagation. That is still based on gradient descent.

One way to think about gradient descent, backpropagation, and perhaps all machine learning is this: “Machine Learning is the set of mathematical algorithms that learn from experience. Good judgment comes experience. And experience comes from bad judgment.” In our case, the initial guess for our random cold-start model can be considered “bad judgment”, but then experience (i.e., the feedback from validation metrics such as gradient descent) bring “good judgment” (better models) into our model-building workflow.

Here are ten examples of cold-start problems in data science where the algorithms and techniques of machine learning produce the good judgment in model progression toward the optimal solution:

  • Clustering analysis (such as K-Means Clustering), where the initial cluster means and the number of clusters are not known in advance (and thus are chosen randomly initially), but the compactness of the clusters can be used to evaluate, iterate, and improve the set of clusters in a progression to the final optimum set of clusters (i.e., the most compact and best separated clusters).
  • Neural networks, where the initial weights on the network edges are assigned randomly (a cold-start), but backpropagation is used to iterate the model to the optimal network (with highest classification performance).
  • TensorFlow deep learning, which uses the same backpropagation technique of simpler neural networks, but the calculation of the weight adjustments is made across a very high-dimensional parameter space of deep network layers and edge weights using tensors.
  • Regression, which uses the sum of the squares of the deviations of the points from the model curve in order to find the best-fit curve. In linear regression, there is a closed-form solution (derivable from the linear least-squares technique). The solution for non-linear regression is not typically a closed-form set of mathematical equations, but the minimization of the sum of the squares of deviations still applies — gradient descent can be used in an iterative workflow to find the optimal curve. Note that K-Means Clustering is actually an example of piecewise regression.
  • Nonconvex optimization, where the objective function has many hills and valleys, so that gradient descent and hill-climbing will typically converge only to a local optimum, not to the global optimum. Techniques like genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization (when the gradient cannot be calculated), and other evolutionary computing methods are used to generate lots of random (cold-start) models and then iterate each of them until you find the global optimum (or until you run out of time and resources, and then pick the best one that you could find). [See my graphic attached below that illustrates a sample use case for genetic algorithms. See also the NOTE below the graphic about Genetic Algorithms, which also applies to other evolutionary algorithms, indicating that these are not machine learning algorithms specifically, but they are actually meta-learning algorithms]
  • kNN (k-Nearest Neighbors), which is a supervised learning technique in which the data set itself becomes the model. In other words, the assignment of a new data point to a particular group (which may or may not have a class label or a particular meaning yet) is based simply upon finding which category (group) of existing data points is in the majority when you take a vote of the nearest neighbors to the new data point. The number of nearest neighbors that are to be examined is some number k, which can be initially arbitrary (a cold-start), but then it is adjusted to improve model performance.
  • Naive Bayes classification, which applies Bayes theorem to a large data set with class labels on the data items, but for which some combinations of attributes and features are not represented in the training data (i.e., a cold-start challenge). By assuming that the different attributes are mutually independent features of the data items, then one can estimate the posterior likelihood for what the class label should be for a new data item with a feature vector (set of attributes) that is not found in the training data. This is sometimes called a Bayes Belief Network (BBN) and is another example of where the data set becomes the model, where the frequency of occurrence of the different attributes individually can inform the expected frequency of occurrence of different combinations of the attributes.
  • Markov modeling (Belief Networks for Sequences) is an extension of BBN to sequences, which can include web logs, purchase patterns, gene sequences, speech samples, videos, stock prices, or any other temporal or spatial or parametric sequence.
  • Association rule mining, which searches for co-occurring associations that occur higher than expected from a random sampling of a data set. Association rule mining is yet another example where the data set becomes the model, where no prior knowledge of the associations is known (i.e., a cold-start challenge). This technique is also called Market Basket Analysis, which has been used for simple cold-start customer purchase recommendations, but it also has been used in such exotic use cases as tropical storm (hurricane) intensification prediction.
  • Social network (link) analysis, where the patterns in the network (e.g., centrality, reach, degrees of separation, density, cliques, etc.) encode knowledge about the network (e.g., most authoritative or influential nodes in the network), through the application of algorithms like PageRank, without any prior knowledge about those patterns (i.e., a cold-start).

Finally, as a bonus, we mention a special case, Recommender Engines, where the cold-start problem is a subject of ongoing research. The research challenge is to find the optimal recommendation for a new customer or for a new product that has not been seen before. Check out these articles  related to this challenge:

  1. The Cold Start Problem for Recommender Systems
  2. Tackling the Cold Start Problem in Recommender Systems
  3. Approaching the Cold Start Problem in Recommender Systems

We started this article mentioning Confucius and his wisdom. Here is another form of wisdomhttps://rapidminer.com/wisdom/ — the RapidMiner Wisdom conference. It is a wonderful conference, with many excellent tutorials, use cases, applications, and customer testimonials. I was honored to be the keynote speaker for their 2018 conference in New Orleans, where I spoke about “Clearing the Fog around Data Science and Machine Learning: The Usual Suspects in Some Unusual Places”. You can find my slide presentation here: KirkBorne-RMWisdom2018.pdf 

NOTE: Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are an example of meta-learning. They are not machine learning algorithms in themselves, but GAs can be applied across ensembles of machine learning models and tasks, in order to find the optimal model (perhaps globally optimal model) across a collection of locally optimal solutions.

Variety is the Secret Sauce for Big Discoveries in Big Data

When I was out for a walk recently, I heard a loud low-flying aircraft passing overhead. This was not unusual since we live in the flight path of planes landing at a major international airport about 10 miles from our home. In this case, I thought to myself that the sound seemed more directly overhead and lower than normal as well as being suggestive of a larger than average jet aircraft.

I realized that in my one simple thought, I had made three different inferences from a single stream of data. The data stream was the audible sound of the aircraft. The three inferences were about the altitude (lower than normal), the size (larger than average), and the flight path (more overhead). When I looked up, my tri-inference hypothesis was confirmed. The plane was a very large, low-flying jet for a major overnight shipping company. The slightly unusual flight path may have been associated with the fact that these planes are probably instructed to land on a different runway at the airport than the usual commercial passenger airlines’ flights – consequently, the altitude and location were slightly different from the slightly smaller commercial passenger airlines that pass overhead every day.

This situation caused me to reflect on how often we can jump to conclusions, infer a hypothesis, and (maybe without as much proof as in this case) we assume that our conclusion is true.

For the modern digital organization, the proof of any inference (that drives decisions) should be in the data! Rich and diverse data collections enable more accurate and trustworthy conclusions.

I frequently refer to the era of big data as “the end of demographics”. By that, I mean that we now have many more features, attributes, data sources, and insights into each entity in our domain: people, processes, and products. These multiple data sources enable a “360 view” of the entity, thus empowering a more personalized (even hyper-personalized) understanding of and response to the needs of that unique entity. In “big data language”, we are talking about one of the 3 V’s of big data: big data Variety!

High variety is one of the foundational key features of big data — we now measure many more features, characteristics, and dimensions of insight into nearly everything due to the plethora of data sources, sensors, and signals that we measure, monitor, and mine. Consequently, we no longer need to rely on a limited number of features and attributes when making decisions, taking actions, and generating inferences. We can make better, tailored, more personalized decisions and actions. Every entity is unique! That marks the end of demographics.

Here is another example: suppose that a person goes to their doctor to report problems with painful headaches. That is a single symptom (headache pain) — a single data source, a single signal, a single sensor. However, one could imagine a large number of possible inferences from that one single signal. The headaches could be caused by insufficient sleep (sleep apnea), high blood pressure, pregnancy, or a brain tumor. Obviously, each one of these diagnoses carries a seriously different course of action and treatment.

In “data science language”, what we are describing are different segments (clusters) in the hyperspace of symptoms and causes in which the many causes (clusters) are projected on top of one another (overlap one another) in the symptom space. The way that a data scientist resolves that degeneracy (another data science word) is to introduce more parameters (higher variety data) in order to “look at” those overlapping clusters from different angles and perspectives, thus resolving the different diagnosis clusters. High variety data enables the discovery of multiple clusters, and eventually identifies the correct cluster (correct diagnosis, in this case).

Higher variety data means that we are adding data from other sensors, other signals, other sources, and of different types. Going back to our low-flying airplane example, this has the following application: I not only heard the aircraft (sound = audio data), but I also looked at it (sight = visual data) and I observed its flight path (dynamic change over time = time series data). The proof of my inference about the airplane was in the data! Additional data sources provided the variety of data signals that were needed in order to derive a correct conclusion.

Similarly, when you go to the doctor with that headache, the doctor will start asking about other symptoms (e.g., lack of appetite; or other pains) and may order other medical tests (blood pressure checks, or other lab results). Those additional data sources and sensors provide the variety of data signals that are needed in order to derive the correct diagnosis.

These examples (low-flying aircraft, and headache pain) are representative analogies of a large number of different use cases in every organization, every business, and every process. The more data you have, the better you are able to detect and discover interesting and important phenomena and events. However, the more variety of data you have, the better you are able to correctly diagnose, interpret, understand, gain insights from, and take appropriate action in response to those phenomena and events.

High-variety data is the fuel that powers these insights, because variety is definitely the secret sauce for bigger and better discovery from big data collections.

Follow Kirk on Twitter at @KirkDBorne

The Definitive Q&A Guide for Aspiring Data Scientists

I was asked five questions by Alex Woodie of Datanami for his article, “So You Want To Be A Data Scientist”. He used a few snippets from my full set of answers. The longer version of my answers provided additional advice. For aspiring data scientists of all ages, I provide in my article at MapR the full, unabridged version of my answers, which may help you even more to achieve your goal.  Here are Alex’s questions. (Note: I paraphrase the original questions in quotes below.)

1. “What is the number one piece of advice you give to aspiring data scientists?”

2. “What are the most important skills for an aspiring data scientist to acquire?”

3. “Is it better for a person to stay in school and enroll in a graduate program, or is it better to acquire the skills on-the-job?”

4. “For someone who stays in school, do you recommend that they enroll in a program tailored toward data science, or would they get the requisite skills in a ‘hard science’ program such as astrophysics (like you)?”

5. “Do you see advances in analytic packages replacing the need for some of the skills that data scientists have traditionally had, such as programming skills (Python, Java, etc.)?”

Find all of my answers at “The Definitive Q&A for Aspiring Data Scientists“.

Follow Kirk Borne on Twitter @KirkDBorne

Definitive Guides to Data Science and Analytics Things

The Definitive Guide to anything should be a helpful, informative road map to that topic, including visualizations, lessons learned, best practices, application areas, success stories, suggested reading, and more.  I don’t know if all such “definitive guides” can meet all of those qualifications, but here are some that do a good job:

  1. The Field Guide to Data Science (big data analytics by Booz Allen Hamilton)
  2. The Data Science Capability Handbook (big data analytics by Booz Allen Hamilton)
  3. The Definitive Guide to Becoming a Data Scientist (big data analytics)
  4. The Definitive Guide to Data Science – The Data Science Handbook (analytics)
  5. The Definitive Guide to doing Data Science for Social Good (big data analytics, data4good)
  6. The Definitive Q&A Guide for Aspiring Data Scientists (big data analytics, data science)
  7. The Definitive Guide to Data Literacy for all (analytics, data science)
  8. The Data Analytics Handbook Series (big data, data science, data literacy by Leada)
  9. The Big Analytics Book (big data, data science)
  10. The Definitive Guide to Big Data (analytics, data science)
  11. The Definitive Guide to the Data Lake (big data analytics by MapR)
  12. The Definitive Guide to Business Intelligence (big data, business analytics)
  13. The Definitive Guide to Natural Language Processing (text analytics, data science)
  14. A Gentle Guide to Machine Learning (analytics, data science)
  15. Building Machine Learning Systems with Python (a non-definitive guide) (data analytics)
  16. The Definitive Guide to Data Journalism (journalism analytics, data storytelling)
  17. The Definitive “Getting Started with Apache Spark” ebook (big data analytics by MapR)
  18. The Definitive Guide to Getting Started with Apache Spark (big data analytics, data science)
  19. The Definitive Guide to Hadoop (big data analytics)
  20. The Definitive Guide to the Internet of Things for Business (IoT, big data analytics)
  21. The Definitive Guide to Retail Analytics (customer analytics, digital marketing)
  22. The Definitive Guide to Personalization Maturity in Digital Marketing Analytics (by SYNTASA)
  23. The Definitive Guide to Nonprofit Analytics (business intelligence, data mining, big data)
  24. The Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics & Analytics
  25. The Definitive Guide to Campaign Tagging in Google Analytics (marketing, SEO)
  26. The Definitive Guide to Channels in Google Analytics (SEO)
  27. A Definitive Roadmap to the Future of Analytics (marketing, machine learning)
  28. The Definitive Guide to Data-Driven Attribution (digital marketing, customer analytics)
  29. The Definitive Guide to Content Curation (content-based marketing, SEO analytics)
  30. The Definitive Guide to Collecting and Storing Social Profile Data (social big data analytics)
  31. The Definitive Guide to Data-Driven API Testing (analytics automation, analytics-as-a-service)
  32. The Definitive Guide to the World’s Biggest Data Breaches (visual analytics, privacy analytics)

Follow Kirk Borne on Twitter @KirkDBorne

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Blogging My Way Through Data Science, Big Data, and Analytics

I frequently write blog posts on other sites.  You can find those articles here (updated March 21, 2016):

I also write “one-off” blog posts, such as these examples:

Follow Kirk Borne on Twitter @KirkDBorne