5 Ways To Produce Deeper Analytics
Data analytics has gone from buzzword to necessity in only a couple of decades. With that change, though, a competitive need has emerged for producing deeper analytics. If you're trying to go further, data analytics consultants will tell you to explore the following methods.
Rate of Change
Knowing how much a data point is changing over time is important, and it's often one of the main benefits of employing analytics. However, you can look beyond whether a number is moving up or down. The rate of change is often equally or even more important.
Suppose a retailer is sampling mentions of fashion trends on social media. By incorporating the rate of change, a data analytics company can tell the retailer whether a trend is gaining steam or starting to die down. If the rate of change starts to consistently slow down, the retailer might take that as a warning that the trend is preparing to reverse.
Robust Cleaning
Analytics engines have to make do with the data available on a system. If the data is buggy, even with a few minor errors and outliers, that can skew your analysis. Adding a robust data cleaning process can improve the quality of your analyses.
Prescriptive Analytics
Many organizations now use predictive analytics. Knowing where things are going is important, but it's also important to consider which solutions might be best. You might create a series of simulations, for example, to test which possible solutions may deliver the best results. These simulations could incorporate time series, cost-benefit, and other analyses to optimize proposed solutions as much as possible.
Improved Dashboards
Improving access to data and predictions can drive performance as much as upgrading the underlying analytics. Even a simple functional improvement to the dashboard, such as providing better mobile device access, can allow people in the field to make better decisions faster.
You also can provide a variety of graphing options in a dashboard. If someone wants to compare the log-normal of a trend against a more linear view, for example, they should be able to do that with a single click while viewing a chart.
Tech Upgrades
The advent of multicore CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs has created new opportunities for analyzing gigantic datasets. Making upgrades to incorporate more processing power offers the opportunity to explore more variables at once. Especially if you're using machine learning and neural networks, these changes may offer orders of magnitude in improved analytics.
For more information, reach out to a data analytics company, such as Bay Tech Analytics.