Member Avatar for nakiyingi

I am interested in big data analytics and need help in finding the most appropriate research question. I would wish the ideas to include design of algorithms or computational algorithms.

Your ideas are all welcome and will highly be appreciated.

Diana

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by rubberman
Member Avatar for L7Sqr

Big Data is simply a newly popular term - much like The Cloud was a few years ago. In order to do anything relevant you will need (at least):

  • a purpose
  • a source for your data (it is not easy to come by terabytes worth of data)

Without a purpose you have only a large mound of data. If your purpose is simply processing massive amounts of information at faster speeds you should investigate existing solutions and how they do or do not fail. Use that information to drive your research. If you are looking to use the data to predict or describe some set of events you will need to define the domain you wish to operate over. Using algorithms and techniques aimed at weather and forecasting on financial data will be mostly useless (unless your goal is to map one onto the other, of course).

Without the data you have no input with which to test your hypothesis/code. So finding an appropriate source is critical.

Member Avatar for rubberman

Big data is often the term used when referring to nosql database tools such as Hadoop, Red Shift, etc. Analysis of the data such databases contain requires specialized tools that can distribute the load, which Hadoop tools like Map Reduce can provide.

You have to provide the code to implement the algorithms you wish to apply to the data, and that can encompass such things as integral and differential calculus, statistics algorithms, etc. This is not a domain for those who are weak in math... :-)

FWIW, the organization I work for employs a team of mathematics and statistics PhDs who develop these algorithms. IE, it is not a domain you just jump into!

So, if you have such knowledge and capabilities, then you are the one best positioned to decide what research question(s) you would like to explore.

Good luck!

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