The Buzz
Looking to predict the future is no new idea. How it is done has changed though and that's one reason that Time magazine lists “Big Data” as the number two buzzword of 2012, led only by the not very surprising “Fiscal Cliff”. (Thanks Chuck for the heads up tweet.) We’ve been through this buzzword fatigue before – green, cloud, everything “e”.
Perhaps the key lesson is that while they can indeed get tiresome, the terms draw early attention to something that will ultimately become quite valuable and will also entwine with normalcy enough to be hardly noted as special.
Just essential.
Business
To move past the hype, it helps to look at real examples of Big Data’s practical predictive application. Success stories that get us past all the Hadoop.
Chuck pointed to one in the early stages that is transforming EMC Marketing. Forbes noted three in a recent article that also projected a spend of $50 billion on Big Data marketing alone. The point is that early successes have yielded promising increases in revenues and productivity. One important point – keep it simple.
For example, an insurance company that asked two simple questions: How much should be invested in Marketing and where should it be spent? The result was a proprietary model that helped “optimize spending across channels at the zip code level.”
In a related article McKinsey refers to this as “destination thinking” and notes that, combined with a clear definition of success and specific milestones, it creates the big data requirements and avoids fatal ambiguity.
Another Forbes example describes a Telco that used its customer payment histories to help financial companies identify potential credit risks. Again, a simple question: is there a correlation between the people who pay their cell phone bills and their general credit worthiness? Of course the follow on was: Can we sell the information to financial companies for a profit?
Murder
Can data analytics predict the likelihood of murder? According to a study from Michigan State University, it seems that the answer is yes, murders mimic infectious disease.
A November 29th press release outlines the results of a research team led by April Zeolli to be published in Justice Quarterly. Using the same analytic techniques that track the spread of infectious disease, they studied 2366 Murders committed in Newark New Jersey between 1982 and 2008. Their conclusion is that “By using the principles of infectious disease control, we may be able to predict the spread of homicide and reduce the incidence of this crime.”
“The study is one of the first to use analytic software from the field of medical geography to track long-term homicide trends. Zeoli said the method can be done in real time which would allow police to identify emerging hotspots.
The researchers also identified areas of Newark that had no homicide clusters during the 26-year time frame of the study, despite being surrounded by deadly violence.
“If we could discover why some of those communities are resistant,” Zeoli said, “we could work on increasing the resistance of our communities that are more susceptible to homicide.”
So, real time predictive analytics that police can use to forecast violence and even murder. How sci-fi is that? (See the movie “Minority Report”.)
Back to the opening statement about buzzwords. Nowhere in the Michigan press release or any of the other reports on this study did I see the term “Big Data” - which is a good thing. Perhaps the sample size was too small. Doesn’t matter, the principles are the same. And if the idea grows, we could have a national model of predictive analytics for homicide.
That would be very big.
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