What is Data Analytics? | Data Analytics Definition, use cases or applications
This basic guide covers data analytics definition, data analytics use cases or data analytics applications. It also mentions link to merits and demerits of data analytics.
Introduction: As we know huge amount of data are generated and stored in the large databases due to immense use of internet enabled devices and applications across the world. Moreover machines and sensors generate data faster than humans. It is difficult to analyse these complex and large data sets with the help of normal database management tools and traditional data processing applications and softwares. Data Analytics tools are developed to address these high volume, high velocity and/or high variety of information assets.
Data Analytics Definition
The process of analyzing data sets after performing extraction, profiling, cleansing, deduping operations in order to derive useful informations or conclusions with the help of hardware/software is known as data analytics. The following figure-1 depicts the data analytics block diagram.

The companies which use data analytics tools perform better. It helps to increase revenue, decrease costs and increase productivity of the companies. As shown data analytics consists of data sourcing, data analysis and data representations.
Data Sourcing:
• The data are sourced from various sources which include both open
and close data sets.
• It include both personal, official and public data from wide variety of sources.
• It uses scientific data from astronomy, Genomics, Biological research.
• It uses data from web such as log files, web indexing, text and documents.
• It uses official data from business transactions.
• It uses data from various sensors such as temperature, humidity,
proximity for weather forecasting, surveillance etc.
• It uses personal data from social networks (facebook, twitter, google plus),
call records from telecom service providers and medical records from hospitals.
• It uses photos or images and videos.
• Purchase transaction records from various online
websites.
• GPS signals from various cell phone users.
Data analysis include following functional modules.
Data extraction: The process of extracting and storing the data from
data sources mentioned above is known as data extraction.
Data Profiling: The process of examining and collecting informative summary in the form of
smaller database from the larger one is known as data profiling.
Data Cleansing: The process of converting sourced data from errors, duplicates and inconsistencies into cleaned
target data is known as data cleansing or data cleaning.
Data Deduping: The process of replacing multiple copies of data into single instance storage
in order to save storage space/bandwidth is known as data deduping or data deduplication.
The data are represented in different textual and graphical forms for evaluation and use by the companies to examine various parameters.
Data Analytics Use Cases | Data Analytics Applications
Following are the use cases or applications of data analytics.
➨It is used by banking, finance and insurance firms to evaluate bahaviour of the people.
➨It is used for online gaming businesses to increase revenue by advertising based on
online historical data with the help of machine learning.
➨It is used by security agencies and military for surveillance.
➨It is used by retail businesses to understand purchase behaviour and perform marketing
accordingly.
➨It is used by telecom companies to analyze call records and customer databases.
➨It is used for scientific data analysis by many companies based on numerous sensors placed at
different locations as per requirements.
➨It is used by social media companies such as facebook, google, twitter to display advertisements as
per user behaviour and historic data.
Refer Advantages and Disadvantages of data analytics >> for more information on
why data analytics is important and what are the challenges involved in adopting it.
Further readings on what is data analytics?
Data analytics tutorial
What is Data Cleansing
What is Data Deduping
What is Data Profiling
Advantages and Disadvantages of data analytics
What is data mining, Big Data and Hadoop?
What is data mining
What is big data
What is Hadoop
Data Mining Glossary
Data mining tools and techniques
What is Cloud Storage
What is cloud storage?
cloud storage tutorial Types Infrastructure How does it work traditional storage vs cloud storage Service providers cloud storage security cloud computing tutorial