The data deluge driven by digitization, networking, and plummeting storage costs has led to profound qualitative changes in the nature of information available for predictive analytics, often summarized by the five Vs:
- Volume: The amount of data generated, collected, and stored is orders of magnitude larger as the byproduct of online and offline activity, transactions, records, and other sources and volumes continue to grow with the capacity for analysis and storage.
- Velocity: Data is generated, transferred, and processed to become available near, or at, real-time speed.
- Variety: Data is organized in formats no longer limited to structured, tabular forms, such as CSV files or relational database tables. Instead, new sources produce semi-structured formats, such as JSON or HTML, and unstructured content, including raw text, image, and audio or video...