Chapter 11: Working with Geospatial Data, NLP, and Image Processing

In this book thus far, we have focused mainly on numeric and categorical features. This is not always the case in big data, as with big data comes an increasing data variety. Image, text, and geospatial data is becoming increasingly valuable in gaining insight and providing solutions to the most complex problems. Recently, for instance, location-based data has been used to improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. For example, different ads can be shown to users according to their location; if they are coffee lovers and close to coffee shops, push notifications could be sent to their mobile devices. In other cases, chatbots, based on advanced text analytics or natural language processing, provide businesses with an efficient and effective avenue to solve customer problems. What is most interesting and an emerging approach to solving commercial problems is the use of multimodal datasets, which combine different...