• Question: What is data analytics

    Asked by anon-258212 on 1 Jul 2020.
    • Photo: Antonis Asiminas

      Antonis Asiminas answered on 1 Jul 2020:

      Great question! Data analytics is describing phenomena, behaviour, basically everything, in a quantitative way.
      For example: you want to see who is the best overall runner out of a group of people. These people have run short and long distance races and you have capture their instant speed throughout their performance. You can measure for example what is their top speed. Is that enough to tell who’s better? Probably not. Then you can measure how fast they can run 100m. Is this enough? Maybe, but you will definitely not be able to tell if someone is a good long distance runner. Then you can measure how long does it take the people in your group to complete 10miles, and so on. With this logic, you can explore your data and in the end come up with a set of metrics that will answer your question: who is the best overall runner.

      This is data analysis. It is common for people to think that data analysis is a a new thing but that not true. We have been analysing data from the beginning of agriculture at least. The reason we hear more about data analysis today is that the technologies to capture data have become so sophisticated that there is an urgent need for people to analyse it. Today’s data analysis is not so much about counting number of apples produced or cm of rain every month. It is about millions of likes on Facebook and Tik-tok or buying habits. These are way more complicated data to deal with. How do you quantify if a person is good buyer? How do you quantify the likelihood of someone liking a song or a movie? It’s an exciting and evolving field that will benefit a lot from people that know how to code and more importantly know how to think!

      I hope this answers your question.

    • Photo: Alan Winfield

      Alan Winfield answered on 1 Jul 2020:

      Analytics is just a trendy way of saying analysis. So data analytics mean the analysis of data – typically looking for trends or patterns. There’s quite a useful article on wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_analysis

      These days data is big business, especially the data that is collected (or ‘scraped’) from web pages and social media. In fact the big AI companies like Google and Facebook make vast amounts of money by collecting data on you and I, then analysing that data in order sell advertising, which is targeted on small groups who – the analysis shows – might be especially receptive to that advertising. This might sound harmless, but there is good evidence that micro-targeting of political ads affected the course of recent elections, including both the UK referendum on EU membership in 2016, and the US presidential election, also in 2016.

      It is often said that data is the new oil. I’m not sure that is the best metaphor, but it correctly reflects how valuable data has become. Some people – including me – think that you and I should own our data and should therefore have the right to stop companies collecting and selling it. Some governments are beginning to take the same approach – about a year ago Germany ruled that “Facebook was exploiting consumers by requiring them to agree to this kind of data collection in order to have an account, and has prohibited the practice going forward”, see https://www.wired.com/story/germany-facebook-antitrust-ruling/ Of course Facebook appealed against the ruling and the case is still being argued today.

    • Photo: Aisling Ryan

      Aisling Ryan answered on 14 Jul 2020:

      I think this question has already been pretty well answered, but as was said data analytics is just analysing data, which basically means you draw a conclusion from something. So in simple terms, if you got all of your classmates to tell you what their favourite hobby is, and then you looked at all of the answers and made a table to show how many people like football, and how many people like music, and how many people like baking, this would be you analysing the data, in other words being a data analyst!! You could then take it a step further and investigate why certain students prefer sport and why other students prefer music; does it have to do with their natural abilities or an interest or peer pressure? And that’s all data analysis is 🙂 Taking some ‘data’ (which could be anything!) and ‘analysing’ it to make some sense out of it if you can 🙂

Comments