If you find the inner-workings of big data analytics to be mind boggling, you are not alone.
The limitlessness of big data is incomprehensible in and of itself, but programs like Power BI Desktop, Hadoop and many others can help you harness important data and take action on it. These intuitive programs can be applied to nearly any application, website or server housing any kind of data.
The majority of real-world Business Intelligence applications I hear of usually involve looking at past customer behavior and generating predictive analysis in order to better understand how to market a product or service in the future. Here is another real-world example that demonstrates the breadth of impact Business Intelligence can have on a wide spectrum of possibilities.
If you haven’t heard of “Pokemon GO” by now, simply open any news site and you will learn about something related to today’s newest and hottest mobile application. Only a month following its advent, Pokemon GO is the most popular mobile application ever released in US history. Making its presence on an international stage as well, the augmented reality geocaching-esque game tracks your location in real-time and alerts you when you are geographically close to something called a virtual Pokemon.
One of Affirma’s BI experts – also a Pokemon GO aficionado – is putting his intuitive technical expertise to the test by initiating a side project aiming to determine which locations in the greater Seattle area have the highest density of rare Pokemon. There is already a web application that tells users precisely where Pokemon are located, called Pokevision, but there is no predictive analysis involved, it simply displays raw data on a map. With this information, he scraped in Pokevision’s raw data – namely which Pokemon “spawn” in certain locations, repeated over hundreds of hours — to Hadoop, an open source software program capable of storing and organizing terabytes of unstructured and complex data. With the data efficiently organized, Power BI Desktop can be integrated to perform a series of number crunching and analytical processes that calculates the percentage chance of Pokemon spawns in certain locations.
This Poke-project is still under construction as many Pokemon tracking websites that would have normally served as data sources are temporarily shut down. Once more data sources become publicly available and a functional web crawler is established, more accurate predictions can be made to help fast-track the development of this new site.
The end result is to ultimately create a website that allows users to click on a certain Pokemon they are looking to track, and from there, a heat map will display where that Pokemon spawns most frequently using Power BI Desktop’s rich data visualizations.
Affirma’s knowledge base is not limited to just Power BI. Whether you need assistance using Hadoop, Power BI Desktop or other related big data software, Affirma’s Business Intelligence Experts are here to help.
On a broader scale, this utilization of both Hadoop and Power BI Desktop together to initiate predictive analytics via Pokemon GO illustrates how data analytics software can be used on nearly any source that houses data. In this case, the intuitive confluence of data organization, predictive analytics and unique visualizations are applied in this new Pokemon GO side-project, but they can also parallel the initiatives of any business looking to get a deeper, crisper look at available data.
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