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Data Visualization

Big Data visualization transforms complex data into graphical formats, enabling quick comprehension and insight extraction for decision-makers. It allows for the identification of trends, correlations, and unexpected patterns, enhancing business intelligence and communication. However, challenges such as the need for visualization specialists, adequate hardware, and data quality must be addressed to fully leverage its potential.

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Valerie Menezes
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3 views

Data Visualization

Big Data visualization transforms complex data into graphical formats, enabling quick comprehension and insight extraction for decision-makers. It allows for the identification of trends, correlations, and unexpected patterns, enhancing business intelligence and communication. However, challenges such as the need for visualization specialists, adequate hardware, and data quality must be addressed to fully leverage its potential.

Uploaded by

Valerie Menezes
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Data Visualization

Big Data visualization calls to mind the old saying: “a picture is worth a thousand
words.”
That's because an image can often convey "what's going on", more quickly, more
efficiently, and often more effectively than words.
Big data visualization techniques exploit this fact: they are all about turning data into
pictures by presenting data in pictorial or graphical format
This makes it easy for decision-makers to take in vast amounts of data at a glance to
"see" what is going on what it is that the data has to say.

What is Big Data Visualization?


Big Data visualization involves the presentation of data of almost any type
in a graphical format that makes it easy to understand and interpret.

But it goes far beyond typical corporate graphs, histograms and pie charts
to more complex representations like heat maps and fever charts, enabling
decision makers to explore data sets to identify correlations or unexpected
patterns.

A defining feature of Big Data visualization is scale.

Today's enterprises collect and store vast amounts of data that would take
years for a human to read, let alone understand.

But researchers have determined that the human retina can transmit data
to the brain at a rate of about 10 megabits per second.

Big Data visualization relies on powerful computer systems to ingest raw


corporate data and process it to generate graphical representations that
allow humans to take in and understand vast amounts of data in seconds.
Importance of Big Data Visualization
The amount of data created by corporations around the world is growing
every year, and thanks to innovations such as the Internet of Things this
growth shows no sign of abating.

The problem for businesses is that this data is only useful if valuable
insights can be extracted from it and acted upon.

To do that decision makers need to be able to access, evaluate,


comprehend and act on data in near real-time, and Big Data visualization
promises a way to be able to do just that.

Big Data visualization is not the only way for decision makers to analyze
data, but Big Data visualization techniques offer a fast and effective way to:

• Review large amounts of data – data presented in graphical form


enables decision makers to take in large amounts of data and gain an
understanding of what it means very quickly – far more quickly than
poring over spreadsheets or analyzing numerical tables.
• Spot trends – time-sequence data often captures trends, but spotting
trends hidden in data is notoriously hard to do – especially when the
sources are diverse and the quantity of data is large. But the use of
appropriate Big Data visualization techniques can make it easy to
spot these trends, and in business terms a trend that is spotted early
is an opportunity that can be acted upon.
• Identify correlations and unexpected relationships – One of the
huge strengths of Big Data visualization is that enables users to
explore data sets – not to find answers specific questions, but to
discover what unexpected insights the data can reveal. This can be
done by adding or removing data sets, changing scales, removing
outliers, and changing visualization types. Identifying previously
unsuspected patterns and relationships in data can provide
businesses with a huge competitive advantage.
• Present the data to others – An oft-overlooked feature of Big Data
visualization is that it provides a highly effective way to communicate
any insights that it surfaces to others. That's because it can convey
meaning very quickly and in a way that it is easy to understand:
precisely what is needed in both internal and external business
presentations.
How Data Visualization Works
The human brain has evolved to take in and understand visual information,
and it excels at visual pattern recognition.

It is this ability that enables humans to spot signs of danger, as well as to


recognize human faces and specific human faces such as family members.

Big data visualization techniques exploit this by presenting data in visual


form so it can be processed by this hard-wired human ability almost
instantly – rather than, for example, by mathematical analysis that has to
be learned and laboriously applied.

The trick with Big Data visualization is choosing the most effective way to
visualize the data to surface any insights it may contain.

In some circumstances simple business tools such as pie charts or


histograms may reveal the whole story, but with large, numerous and
diverse data sets more esoteric visualization techniques may be more
appropriate.

Various Big Data visualization examples include:

Linear: Lists of items, items sorted by a single feature.

2D/Planar/geospatial: Cartograms, dot distribution maps, proportional


symbol maps, contour maps.

3D/Volumetric: 3D computer models, computer simulations

Temporal: Timelines, time series charts, connected scatter plots, arc


diagrams, circumplex charts.

Multidimensional: Pie charts, histograms, tag clouds, bar charts, tree


maps, heat maps, spider charts.

Tree/hierarchical: Dendograms, radial tree charts, hyperbolic tree charts.


Is Big Data Visualization for You?
The answer to this question is almost certainly "yes," and here's why.

Big Data is all about collecting and keeping large amounts of data (rather
than discarding it) because data storage is cheap and the value of the
insights the data contains may be high.

There are a number of ways to analyze data, but the most effective - or
indeed the only way – that some insights can be surfaced and exposed is
through Big Data visualization.

In fact the amount of data that an organization stores does not need to be
particularly large in order for it to benefit from Big Data visualization
techniques: the periodic table is a perfect Big Data visualization example
that clearly reveals otherwise -obscured relationships between just a
hundred or so elements.
The challenges of Big Data
Visualization
Big Data visualization can be an extremely powerful business capability,
but before an organization can take advantage of it some key issues need
to be addressed. These include:

• Availability of visualization specialists: Many Big Data


visualization tools are designed to be easy enough for anyone in an
organization to use, often suggesting appropriate Big Data
visualization examples for the data sets under analysis. But to get
the most out of some tools it may be necessary to employ a
specialist in big data visualization techniques who can select the best
data sets and visualization styles to ensure the data is exploited to
the maximum.
• Visualization hardware resources: Under the hood, Big Data
visualization is essentially a computing task, and the ability to carry
out this task quickly – to enable organizations to make decisions in a
timely manner using real-time data – may require powerful computer
hardware, fast storage systems, or even a move to cloud. That
means Big Data visualization initiatives are as much an IT project as
a management project.
• Data quality: The insights that can be drawn from Big Data
visualization are only as accurate as the data that is being visualized:
if it is inaccurate or out of date then the value of any insights is
questionable. That means people and processes need to be put in
place to manage corporate data, metadata, data sources, and any
transformations or data cleaning that are performed before storage.

Big Data Visualization Tools


A quick survey of the Big Data tools marketplace reveals the presence of
big names including Microsoft, SAP, IBM and SAS. But there are plenty of
specialist software vendors offering leading bog data visualization tools,
and these include Tableau Software, Qlik and TIBCO Software. Leading
data visualization products include those offered by:

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