R: Mining Spatial, Text, Web, and Social Media Data

What is Big Data?

People create 2.5 quintillion bytes (2.5 * 1018) of data, or nearly 2.3 million Terabytes of data every day, so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Furthermore, rather than being a large collection of disparate data, much of this data flow consists of data on similar things, generating huge data-sets with billions upon billions of observations. Big Data refers not only to the deluge of data being generated, but also to the astronomical size of data-sets themselves. Both factors create challenges and opportunities for data scientists.

This data comes from everywhere: physical sensors used to gather information, human sensors such as the social web, transaction records, ...