Motivation for data analysis

In this section, we discuss the trends that are making data analysis an increasingly important field in today's fast-moving technological landscape.

We live in a big data world

The term big data has become one of the hottest technology buzzwords in the past two years. We now increasingly hear about big data in various media outlets, and big data start-ups have increasingly been attracting venture capital. A good example in the area of retail is Target Corporation, which has invested substantially in big data and is now able to identify potential customers by using big data to analyze people's shopping habits online; refer to a related article at http://nyti.ms/19LT8ic.

Loosely speaking...