Big Data in Healthcare: Improving Patient Outcomes

Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Article | May 15, 2023

There’s a lot of information out there related to COVID-19. But right now—when it’s more important than ever to quickly access and analyze data —figuring out how to effectively use COVID-19 data to better manage your business can still be a challenge. We can help. Several customers have leveraged their Incorta platforms to instantaneously integrate COVID-19 data into their enterprise data and analytics dashboards.

Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Article | August 17, 2023

Massive amount of data is collected and stored by companies in the search for the “Holy Grail”. One crucial component is the discovery and application of novel approaches to achieve a more complete picture of datasets provided by the local (sometimes global) event-based analytic strategy that currently dominates a specific field. Bringing qualitative data to life is essential since it provides management decisions’ context and nuance. An NLP perspective for uncovering word-based themes across documents will facilitate the exploration and exploitation of qualitative data which are often hard to “identify” in a global setting. NLP can be used to perform different analysis mapping drivers. Broadly speaking, drivers are factors that cause change and affect institutions, policies and management decision making. Being more precise, a “driver” is a force that has a material impact on a specific activity or an entity, which is contextually dependent, and which affects the financial market at a specific time. (Litterio, 2018). Major drivers often lie outside the immediate institutional environment such as elections or regional upheavals, or non-institutional factors such as Covid or climate change. In Total global strategy: Managing for worldwide competitive advantage, Yip (1992) develops a framework based on a set of four industry globalization drivers, which highlights the conditions for a company to become more global but also reflecting differentials in a competitive environment. In The lexicons: NLP in the design of Market Drivers Lexicon in Spanish, I have proposed a categorization into micro, macro drivers and temporality and a distinction among social, political, economic and technological drivers. Considering the “big picture”, “digging” beyond usual sectors and timeframes is key in state-of-the-art findings. Working with qualitative data. There is certainly not a unique “recipe” when applying NLP strategies. Different pipelines could be used to analyse any sort of textual data, from social media and reviews to focus group notes, blog comments and transcripts to name just a few when a MetaQuant team is looking for drivers. Generally, being textual data the source, it is preferable to avoid manual task on the part of the analyst, though sometimes, depending on the domain, content, cultural variables, etc. it might be required. If qualitative data is the core, then the preferred format is .csv. because of its plain nature which typically handle written responses better. Once the data has been collected and exported, the next step is to do some pre-processing. The basics include normalisation, morphosyntactic analysis, sentence structural analysis, tokenization, lexicalization, contextualization. Just simplify the data to make analysis easier. Topic modelling. Topic modelling refers to the task of recognizing words from the main topics that best describe a document or the corpus of data. LAD (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) is one of the most powerful algorithms with excellent implementations in the Python’s Gensim package. The challenge: how to extract good quality of topics that are clear and meaningful. Of course, this depends mostly on the nature of text pre-processing and the strategy of finding the optimal number of topics, the creation of a lexicon(s) and the corpora. We can say that a topic is defined or construed around the most representative keywords. But are keywords enough? Well, there are some other factors to be observed such as: 1. The variety of topics included in the corpora. 2. The choice of topic modelling algorithm. 3. The number of topics fed to the algorithm. 4. The algorithms tuning parameters. As you probably have noticed finding “the needle in the haystack” is not that easy. And only those who can use creatively NLP will have the advantage of positioning for global success.

Business Intelligence, Big Data Management, Big Data

Article | July 4, 2023

The Internet of Things has been the hype in the past few years. It is set to play an important role in industries. Not only businesses but also consumers attempt to follow developments that come with the connected devices. Smart meters, sensors, and manufacturing equipment all can remodel the working system of companies. Based on the Statista reports, the IoT market value of 248 billion US dollars in 2020 is expected to reach a worth of 1.6 Trillion USD by 2025. The global market is in the support of IoT development and its power to bring economic growth. But, the success of IoT without the integration of data analytics is impossible. This major growth component of IoT is the blend of IoT and Big Data - together known as IoT Data Analytics. Understanding IoT Data Analytics IoT Data Analytics is the analysis of large volumes of data that has been gathered from connected devices. As IoT devices generate a lot of data even in the shortest period, it becomes complex to analyze the enormous data volumes. Besides, the IoT data is quite similar to big data but has a major difference in their size and number of sources. To overcome the difficulty in IoT data integration, IoT data analytics is the best solution. With this combination, the process of data analysis becomes cost-effective, easier, and rapid. Why Data Analytics and IoT Will Be Indispensable? Data analytics is an important part of the success of IoT investments or applications. IoT along with Data analytics will allow businesses to make efficient use of datasets. How? Let’s get into it! Impelling Revenue Using data analytics in IoT investments businesses will become able to gain insight into customer behavior. It will lead to the crafting offers and services accordingly. As a result, companies will see a hike in their profits and revenue. Volume The vast amount of data sets that are being used by IoT applications needs to be organized and analyzed to obtain patterns. It can easily be achieved by using IoT analytics software. Competitive Advantage In an era full of IoT devices and applications, the competition has also increased. You can gain a competitive advantage by hire developers that can help with the IoT analytics implementations. It will assist businesses in providing better services and stand out from the competition. Now the next question arises: Where is it being implemented? Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Siemens, VMware, and Huawei are using IoT data analytics for product usage analysis, sensor data analysis, camera data analysis, improved equipment maintenance, and optimizing operations. The Rise of IoT Data Analytics With the help of IoT Data Analytics, companies are ready to achieve more information that can be used to improve their overall performance and revenue. Although it has not reached every corner of the market yet, it is still being used for making the workplace more efficient and safe. The ability to analyze and predict data in real-time is definitely a game-changer for companies that need all of their equipment to work efficiently all the time. It is continuously growing to provide insights that were never possible before.

Article | June 21, 2021

The marketing industry keeps changing every year. Businesses and enterprises have the task of keeping up with the changes in marketing trends as they evolve. As consumer demands and behavior changed, brands had to move from traditional marketing channels like print and electronic to digital channels like social media, Google Ads, YouTube, and more. Businesses have begun to consider marketing analytics a crucial component of marketing as they are the primary reason for success. In uncertain times, marketing analytics tools calculate and evaluate the market status and enhances better planning for enterprises. As Covid-19 hit the world, organizations that used traditional marketing analytics tools and relied on historical data realized that many of these models became irrelevant. The pandemic rendered a lot of data useless. With machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in marketers’ arsenal, marketing analytics is turning virtual with a shift in the marketing landscape in 2021. They are also pivoting from relying on just AI technologies but rather combining big data with it. AI and machine learning help advertisers and marketers to improve their target audience and re-strategize their campaigns through advanced marketing attributes, which in turn increases customer retention and customer loyalty. While technology is making targeting and measuring possible, marketers have had to reassure their commitment to consumer privacy and data regulations and governance in their initiatives. They are also relying on third-party data. These data and analytics trends will help organizations deal with radical changes and uncertainties, with opportunities they bring with them over the next few years. To know why businesses are gravitating towards these trends in marketing analytics, let us look at why it is so important. Importance of Marketing Analytics As businesses extended into new marketing categories, new technologies were implemented to support them. This new technology was usually deployed in isolation, which resulted in assorted and disconnected data sets. Usually, marketers based their decisions on data from individual channels like website metrics, not considering other marketers channels. Website and social media metrics alone are not enough. In contrast, marketing analytics tools look at all marketing done across channels over a period of time that is vital for sound decision-making and effective program execution. Marketing analytics helps understand how well a campaign is working to achieve business goals or key performance indicators. Marketing analytics allows you to answer questions like: • How are your marketing initiatives/ campaigns working? What can be done to improve them? • How do your marketing campaigns compare with others? What are they spending their time and money on? What marketing analytics software are they using that helps them? • What should be your next step? How should you allocate the marketing budget according to your current spending? Now that the advantages of marketing analytics are clear, let us get into the details of the trends in marketing analytics of 2021: Rise of real-time marketing data analytics Reciprocation to any action is the biggest trend right now in digital marketing, especially post Covid. Brands and businesses strive to respond to customer queries and provide them with solutions. Running queries in a low-latency customer data platform have allowed marketers to filter the view by the audience and identify underachieving sectors. Once this data is collected, businesses and brands can then readjust their customer targeting and messaging to optimize their performance. To achieve this on a larger scale, organizations need to invest in marketing analytics software and platforms to balance data loads with processing for business intelligence and analytics. The platform needs to allow different types of jobs to run parallel by adding resources to groups as required. This gives data scientists more flexibility and access to response data at any given time. Real-time analytics will also aid marketers in identifying underlying threats and problems in their strategies. Marketers will have to conduct a SWOT analysis and continuously optimize their campaigns to suit them better. . Data security, regulatory compliance, and protecting consumer privacy Protecting market data from a rise in cybercrimes and breaches are crucial problems to be addressed in 2021. This year has seen a surge in data breaches that have damaged businesses and their infrastructures to different levels. As a result, marketers have increased their investments in encryption, access control, network monitoring, and other security measures. To help comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other regulatory bodies, organizations have made the shift to platforms where all consumer data is in one place. Advanced encryptions and stateless computing have made it possible to securely store and share governed data that can be kept in a single location. Interacting with a single copy of the same data will help compliance officers tasked with identifying and deleting every piece of information related to a particular customer much easier and the possibility of overseeing something gets canceled. Protecting consumer privacy is imperative for marketers. They offer consumers the control to opt out, eradicate their data once they have left the platform, and remove information like location, access control to personally identifiable information like email addresses and billing details separated from other marketing data. Predictive analytics Predictive analytics’ analyzes collected data and predicts future outcomes through ML and AI. It maps out a lookalike audience and identifies which strata are most likely to become a high-value customer and which customer strata has the highest likelihood of churn. It also gauges people’s interests based on their browsing history. With better ML models, predictions have become better overtime, leading to increased customer retention and a drop in churn. According to the research by Zion Market Research, by 2022, the global market for predictive analytics is set to hit $11 billion. Investment in first-party data Cookies-enabled website tracking led marketers to know who was visiting their website and re-calibrate their ads to these people throughout the web. However, in 2020, Google announced cookies would be phased out of Chrome within two years while they had already removed them from Safari and Firefox. Now that adding low-friction tracking to web pages will be tough, marketers will have to gather more limited data. This will then be then integrated with first-party data sets to get a rounded view of the customer. Although a big win for consumer privacy activists, it is difficult for advertisers and agencies to find it more difficult to retarget ads and build audiences in their data management platforms. In a digital world without cookies, marketers now understand how customer data is collected, introspect on their marketing models, and evaluate their marketing strategy. Emergence of contextual customer experience These trends in marketing analytics have become more contextually conscious since the denunciation of cookies. Since marketers are losing their data sets and behavioral data, they have an added motivation to invest in insights. This means that marketers have to target messaging based on known and inferred customer characteristics like their age, location, income, brand affinity, and where these customers are in their buying journey. For example, marketers should tailor messaging in ads to make up consumers based on the frequency of their visits to the store. Effective contextual targeting hinges upon marketers using a single platform for their data and creates a holistic customer profile. Reliance on third-party data Even though there has been a drop in third-party data collection, marketers will continue to invest in third-party data which have a complete understanding of their customers that augments the first-party data they have. Historically, third-party data has been difficult to source and maintain for marketers. There are new platforms that counter improvement of data like long time to value, cost of maintaining third-party data pipelines, and data governance problems. U.S. marketers have spent upwards of $11.9 billion on third-party audience data in 2019, up 6.1% from 2018, and this reported growth curve is going to be even steeper in 2021, according to a study by Interactive Advertising Bureau and Winterberry Group. Conclusion Marketing analytics enables more successful marketing as it shows off direct results of the marketing efforts and investments. These new marketing data analytics trends have made their definite mark and are set to make this year interesting with data and AI-based applications mixed with the changing landscape of marketing channels. Digital marketing will be in demand more than ever as people are purchasing more online. Frequently Asked Questions Why is marketing analytics so important? Marketing analytics has two main purposes; to gauge how well your marketing efforts perform and measure the effectiveness of marketing activity. What is the use of marketing analytics? Marketing analytics help us understand how everything plays off of each other and decide how to invest, whether to re-prioritize or keep going with the current methods. Which industries use marketing analytics? Commercial organizations use it to analyze data from different sources, use analytics to determine the success of a marketing campaign, and target customers specifically. What are the types of marketing analytics tools? Some marketing analytics’ tools are Google Analytics, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Semrush, Looker, Optimizely, etc. { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [{ "@type": "Question", "name": "Why is marketing analytics so important?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Marketing analytics has two main purposes; to gauge how well your marketing efforts perform and measure the effectiveness of marketing activity." } },{ "@type": "Question", "name": "What is the use of marketing analytics?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Marketing analytics help us understand how everything plays off of each other and decide how to invest, whether to re-prioritize or keep going with the current methods." } },{ "@type": "Question", "name": "Which industries use marketing analytics?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Commercial organizations use it to analyze data from different sources, use analytics to determine the success of a marketing campaign, and target customers specifically." } },{ "@type": "Question", "name": "What are the types of marketing analytics tools?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Some marketing analytics’ tools are Google Analytics, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Semrush, Looker, Optimizely, etc." } }] }