It is said that it is the era of big data. What does this mean?

Megadata, or huge amount of data, refers to massive, high-growth and diversified information assets, which need new processing modes to have stronger decision-making, insight and process optimization capabilities.

"Big data" refers to a huge data set collected from many sources in various forms, often in real time. In the case of business-to-business sales, these data can be obtained from social networks, e-commerce websites, customer visit records and many other sources. These data are not the normal data set of the company's customer relationship management database.

Extended data

The main characteristics of big data

1, a lot

The characteristic of big data is "big" first. In the former Map3 era, a small MB Map3 can meet the needs of many people. But over time, the storage unit has changed from GB to TB.

Even the current PB and EB levels. With the rapid development of information technology, data began to explode. Social networks (Weibo, Twitter, Facebook), mobile networks, various intelligent tools, service tools, etc. Have become the source of data.

2. Diversity

A wide range of data sources determines the diversity of big data forms. Any form of data can play a role. At present, the most widely used recommendation systems are Taobao, Netease Cloud Music and Today's Headlines. These platforms will further recommend what users like by analyzing users' log data.

Log data is obviously structured data, and some data is not obviously structured, such as pictures, audio and video. These data have weak causality and need to be manually marked.

3. High speed

Big data is produced very quickly, mainly through the Internet. Everyone in life is inseparable from the Internet, which means that every day, individuals are providing a lot of information to big data every day.

And these data need to be processed in time, because it is very uneconomical to spend a lot of capital to store historical data with little effect. For a platform, the saved data may only be the data of the past few days or a month, and the data far away must be cleaned up in time, otherwise the cost is too high.

4. Value

This is also the core feature of big data. Among the data generated in the real world, the proportion of valuable data is very small. Compared with traditional small data, the greatest value of big data lies in learning from a large number of irrelevant types of data.

Dig out valuable data for the prediction and analysis of future trends and patterns, discover new laws and new knowledge through in-depth analysis of machine learning methods, artificial intelligence methods or data mining methods, and apply them to agriculture, finance, medical care and other fields, and finally achieve the effect of improving social governance, improving production efficiency and promoting scientific research.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Big Data Era