Big Data & Data Mining

Dealing with large amounts of data has been a problem throughout most of human history. Ancient civilizations had to keep large amounts of clay tablets, papyrus, steles, parchments, scrolls etc. to keep track of all the details of an empire.

However, whenever it seemed as though there would be no way to hold any more information a new technology would be developed to alleviate the problem. When people could not handle keeping records on stone paper scrolls were invented. When scrolls were no longer practical books were developed. When hand-copying books were too much the printing press came along.

By the mid 20th century there were concerns that we would not be able to have libraries large enough to keep all of the books that were being developed. With this problem came the solution of the computer. One computer could hold the information of several dozen if not hundreds of libraries.

Now even a single computer can no longer cope with all of the information that is constantly being developed for just a single subject. This has lead to computers working together in networks to share the task of storing information. With data spread across several computers, it makes analyzing data much more challenging. It was now necessary to mine for useful information in a way that people used to mine for gold in the 19th century.

Big data is data that is too large to fit within the memory of a single computer. Analyzing data that is spread across a network of databases takes skills different from traditional statistical analysis. This post will explain some of the characteristics of big data as well as data mining.

Big Data Traits

The three main traits of big data are volume, velocity, and variety. Volume describes the size of big data, which means data to big to be on only one computer. Velocity is about how fast the data can be processed. Lastly, variety different types of data. common sources of big data includes the following

  • Metadata from visual sources such as cameras
  • Data from sensors such as in medical equipment
  • Social media data such as information from google, youtube or facebook

Data Mining

Data mining is the process of discovering a model in a big dataset. Through the development of an algorithm, we can find specific information that helps us to answer our questions. Generally, there are two ways to mine data and these are extraction and summarization.

Extraction is the process of pulling specific information from a big dataset. For example, if we want all the addresses of people who bought a specific book from Amazon the result would be an extraction from a big data set.

Summarization is reducing a dataset to describe it. We might do a cluster analysis in which similar data is combined on a characteristic. For example, if we analyze all the books people ordered through Amazon last year we might notice that one cluster of groups buys mostly religious books while another buys investment books.


Big data will only continue to get bigger. Currently, the response has been to just use more computers and servers. As such, there is now a need for finding information on many computers and servers. This is the purpose of data mining, which is to find pertinent information that answers stakeholders questions.

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