Big Data

The main purpose of this book is to investigate, explore and describe approaches and methods to facilitate data understanding through analytics solutions based on its principles, concepts and applications. But analyzing data is also about involving the use of software. For this, and in order to cover some aspect of data analytics, this book uses software (Excel, SPSS, Python, etc) which can help readers to better understand the analytics process in simple terms and supporting useful methods in its application.

A pragmatic approach to Big Data by taking the reader on a journey between Big Data (what it is) and the Smart Data (what it is for). Today’s decision making can be reached via information (related to the data), knowledge (related to people and processes), and timing (the capacity to decide, act and react at the right time). The huge increase in volume of data traffic, and its format (unstructured data such as blogs, logs, and video) generated by the “digitalization” of our world modifies radically our relationship to the space (in motion) and time, dimension and by capillarity, the enterprise vision of performance monitoring and optimization.

The world has become digital and technological advances have multiplied circuits with access to data, their processing and their diffusion. New technologies have now reached a certain maturity. Data are available to everyone, anywhere on the planet. The number of Internet users in 2014 was 2.9 billion or 41% of the world population. The need for knowledge is becoming apparent in order to understand this multitude of data. We must educate, inform and train the masses. The development of related technologies, such as the advent of the Internet, social networks, «cloud-computing» (digital factories), has increased the available volumes of data. Currently, each individual creates, consumes, uses digital information: more than 3.4 million e-mails are sent worldwide every second, or 107,000 billion annually with 14,600 e-mails per year per person, but more than 70% are spam. Billions of pieces of content are shared on social networks such as Facebook, more than 2.46 million every minute. We spend more than 4.8 hours a day on the Internet using a computer, and 2.1 hours using a mobile. Data, this new ethereal manna from heaven, is produced in real time. It comes in a continuous stream from a multitude of sources which are generally heterogeneous. This accumulation of data of all types (audio, video, files, photos, etc.) generates new activities, the aim of which is to analyze this enormous mass of information. It is then necessary to adapt and try new approaches, new methods, new knowledge and new ways of working, resulting in new properties and new challenges since SEO logic must be created and implemented. At company level, this mass of data is difficult to manage. Its interpretation is primarily a challenge. This impacts those who are there to «manipulate» the mass and requires a specific infrastructure for creation, storage, processing, analysis and recovery. The biggest challenge lies in «the valuing of data» available in quantity, diversity and access speed.

Big Data is a new field, with many technological challenges to be understood in order to use it to its full potential. These challenges arise at all stages of working with Big Data, beginning with data generation and acquisition. The storage and management phase presents two critical challenges: infrastructure, for storage and transportation, and conceptual models. Finally, to extract meaning from Big Data requires complex analysis. Here the authors propose using metaheuristics as a solution to these challenges; they are first able to deal with large size problems and secondly flexible and therefore easily adaptable to different types of data and different contexts. The use of metaheuristics to overcome some of these data mining challenges is introduced and justified in the first part of the book, alongside a specific protocol for the performance evaluation of algorithms. An introduction to metaheuristics follows. The second part of the book details a number of data mining tasks, including clustering, association rules, supervised classification and feature selection, before explaining how metaheuristics can be used to deal with them. This book is designed to be self-contained, so that readers can understand all of the concepts discussed within it, and to provide an overview of recent applications of metaheuristics to knowledge discovery problems in the context of Big Data.

This book will be a “must” for people who want good knowledge of big data concepts and their applications in the real world, particularly in the field of insurance. It will be useful to people working in finance and to masters students using big data tools. The authors present the bases of big data: data analysis methods, learning processes, application to insurance and position within the insurance market. Individual chapters a will be written by well-known authors in this field.

A comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of contemporary data science analysis for railway track engineering Featuring a practical introduction to state-of-the-art data analysis for railway track engineering, Big Data and Differential Privacy: Analysis Strategies for Railway Track Engineering addresses common issues with the implementation of big data applications while exploring the limitations, advantages, and disadvantages of more conventional methods. In addition, the book provides a unifying approach to analyzing large volumes of data in railway track engineering using an array of proven methods and software technologies. Dr. Attoh-Okine considers some of today’s most notable applications and implementations and highlights when a particular method or algorithm is most appropriate. Throughout, the book presents numerous real-world examples to illustrate the latest railway engineering big data applications of predictive analytics, such as the Union Pacific Railroad’s use of big data to reduce train derailments, increase the velocity of shipments, and reduce emissions. In addition to providing an overview of the latest software tools used to analyze the large amount of data obtained by railways, Big Data and Differential Privacy: Analysis Strategies for Railway Track Engineering: • Features a unified framework for handling large volumes of data in railway track engineering using predictive analytics, machine learning, and data mining • Explores issues of big data and differential privacy and discusses the various advantages and disadvantages of more conventional data analysis techniques • Implements big data applications while addressing common issues in railway track maintenance • Explores the advantages and pitfalls of data analysis software such as R and Spark, as well as the Apache™ Hadoop® data collection database and its popular implementation MapReduce Big Data and Differential Privacy is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals in transportation science, railway track engineering, design engineering, operations research, and railway planning and management. The book is also appropriate for graduate courses on data analysis and data mining, transportation science, operations research, and infrastructure management. NII ATTOH-OKINE, PhD, PE is Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Delaware. The author of over 70 journal articles, his main areas of research include big data and data science; computational intelligence; graphical models and belief functions; civil infrastructure systems; image and signal processing; resilience engineering; and railway track analysis. Dr. Attoh-Okine has edited five books in the areas of computational intelligence, infrastructure systems and has served as an Associate Editor of various ASCE and IEEE journals.

With the idea of “deep learning” having now become the key to this new generation of solutions, major technological players in the business intelligence sector have taken an interest in the application of Big Data. In this book, the author explores the recent technological advances associated with digitized data flows, which have recently opened up new horizons for AI. The reader will gain insight into some of the areas of application of Big Data in AI, including robotics, home automation, health, security, image recognition and natural language processing.

The different facets of the sharing economy offer numerous opportunities for businesses ? particularly those that can be distinguished by their creative ideas and their ability to easily connect buyers and senders of goods and services via digital platforms. At the beginning of the growth of this economy, the advanced digital technologies generated billions of bytes of data that constitute what we call Big Data. This book underlines the facilitating role of Big Data analytics, explaining why and how data analysis algorithms can be integrated operationally, in order to extract value and to improve the practices of the sharing economy. It examines the reasons why these new techniques are necessary for businesses of this economy and proposes a series of useful applications that illustrate the use of data in the sharing ecosystem.