"Foreword Big data and analytics promise to change virtually every industry and business function over the next decade. Any organization that gets started early with big data can gain a significant competitive edge. Just as early analytical competitors in the "small data" era (including Capital One bank, Progressive Insurance, and Marriott hotels) moved out ahead of their competitors and built a sizable competitive edge, the time is now for firms to seize the big data opportunity. As this book describes, the potential of big data is enabled by ubiquitous computing and data gathering devices; sensors and microprocessors will soon be everywhere. Virtually every mechanical or electronic device can leave a trail that describes its performance, location, or state. These devices, and the people who use them, communicate through the Internet--which leads to another vast data source. When all these bits are combined with those from other media--wireless and wired telephony, cable, satellite, and so forth--the future of data appears even bigger. The availability of all this data means that virtually every business or organizational activity can be viewed as a big data problem or initiative. Manufacturing, in which most machines already have one or more microprocessors, is increasingly a big data environment. Consumer marketing, with myriad customer touchpoints and clickstreams, is already a big data problem. Google has even described its self-driving car as a big data project. Big data is undeniably a big deal, but it needs to be put in context"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

There is an ongoing data explosion transpiring that will make previous creations, collections, and storage of data look trivial. Big Data, Mining, and Analytics: Components of Strategic Decision Making ties together big data, data mining, and analytics to explain how readers can leverage them to extract valuable insights from their data. Facilitating a clear understanding of big data, it supplies authoritative insights from expert contributors into leveraging data resources, including big data, to improve decision making. Illustrating basic approaches of business intelligence to the more complex methods of data and text mining, the book guides readers through the process of extracting valuable knowledge from the varieties of data currently being generated in the brick and mortar and internet environments. It considers the broad spectrum of analytics approaches for decision making, including dashboards, OLAP cubes, data mining, and text mining. Includes a foreword by Thomas H. Davenport, Distinguished Professor, Babson College; Fellow, MIT Center for Digital Business; and Co-Founder, International Institute for Analytics Introduces text mining and the transforming of unstructured data into useful information Examines real time wireless medical data acquisition for today's healthcare and data mining challenges Presents the contributions of big data experts from academia and industry, including SAS Highlights the most exciting emerging technologies for big data--Hadoop is just the beginning Filled with examples that illustrate the value of analytics throughout, the book outlines a conceptual framework for data modeling that can help you immediately improve your own analytics and decision-making processes. It also provides in-depth coverage of analyzing unstructured data with text mining methods to supply you with the well-rounded understanding required to leverage your information assets into improved strategic decision making.