Predictive Analytics: Data Mining, Machine Learning and Data Science for Practitioners, 2nd Edition

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Big Data for Predictive Analytics

Using data to understand customers or clients and business operations to sustain (and foster) growth and profitability is an increasingly challenging task for today’s enterprises. As more and more data becomes available in various forms and fashion, timely processing of the data with traditional means becomes impractical. This phenomenon is called big data, and it is receiving substantial press coverage and drawing increasing interest from both business users and IT professionals—so much so, in fact, that the term big data is becoming an overhyped and overused marketing buzzword.

Big data means different things to people with different backgrounds and interests. Initially, the term big data was used to describe ...