Being ignorant about metadata is not a crime — it’s just agonisingly inconvenient to generate business value from data.
If you ever tried to read articles about metadata on the Internet, you would most likely come across either the horror stories (something around the line of new metadata retention laws with creepy security loopholes that would screw us all) or the utopian fairytales (hey, metadata is the magical silver bullet for data democratisation and making your analytics dream come true).
While metadata seems to be moving the world, it secretly blends into the background, remains quiet and is taken for granted until something blows up.
For better or worse, metadata will always be part of the balancing act between…
A quick tour to understand fundamental concepts in time series for everyone (including those having a fear of maths).
Time series analysis is like air
Imagine a world where time series analysis doesn’t exist! Those painful booms and bust cycles of the economy might sound like random challenges that life throws at us. Governments would have a hard time trying to forecast the economic growth while companies struggle to predict future demand to plan for production.
On a more personal level, you might leave the house only to drive straight into the path of a hurricane because the weather forecast doesn’t even exist. Yikes!
People have been observing how natural phenomenon or social behaviour change with time for ages. In ancient China as early as…
It takes a little more than statistics and machine learning to understand how demand forecasting works.
Meet Julie! She sells ice cream on the Moon
This is Julie. Since the age of six, all she wanted to do is to sell yummy ice cream and bring joy to people every summer. She believed she could, so she did.
Julie is now the boss behind Salty & Icy, one of the best ice cream brands on the Moon. What started as a small space shuttle is now distributing millions of ice cream tubs to space travellers who were eager to explore the craters, fell in love with the beautiful lunar landscape and eventually settled down on the Moon like Julie.
Sounds like a dream, but there…
The very pursuit of accuracy could influence you to pick a terrible model
This is Newt! He has a binary classification problem
It’s surprisingly quick and simple to predict the future with the all-too-familiar SQL syntax.
Expect rain. Only two simple words, yet the stakes sometimes could be much higher than grabbing an umbrella before leaving the house tomorrow. Rain could ruin picnic plans or bring tremendous joy to farmers who are desperate to save their drought-stricken crops.
Learning how to predict next-day rain is a simple and practical way to explore Machine Learning with Google BigQuery. So let’s find out how we can make it happen.
In this article, you’ll discover:
- Why BigQuery ML for Machine Learning?
- How to ingest and split the dataset into a training set and a test set?
- How to train…
The almighty NoSQL database to power mobile sites with real-time analytics for better customer experience
Began as the storage system for the web search index at Google. Made available as a public service via Google Cloud Platform in 2015 and currently powers some of the most prominent web and mobile applications such as Spotify, Google Maps and Google Search. It’s no other than Cloud Bigtable, which is neither suitable for complex joins, ad-hoc interactive queries nor ideal for supporting an online transaction processing (OLTP) system.
So what is it and why might we need a massive database like Cloud Bigtable one day?
You’ll learn:
- The real-world challenge: Site speed and personalisation customer engagement
- A primer…
How to avoid those dreaded pitfalls and “gotcha” moments when selecting databases for your next application?
Asking any developer of an enterprise application, and you’ll know how much they are feeling frustrated with the limitations of relational databases. Too much to the extent that in 2009, a meetup was held in San Francisco to discuss with his peers about open-source, distributed, non-relational databases.
Originally chosen to make a good Twitter hashtag for that meetup, NoSQL caught on like wildfire, yet resulted in no generally accepted definition till now. Fast forward to 2021, businesses have an abundance of choices when it comes to data storage solutions, both relational and non-relational ones.
Yet one thing remains the same…
In a post-COVID-19 future, businesses must be prepared to respond and adapt rapidly. Does the old Hadoop technology even have a place in this new world?
In the emerging world of 2021, big data and machine learning are still the holy grail while the need for superior speed and agility continues to accelerate cloud adoption. Does the old Hadoop technology even have a place in this new world? To shed some light on that question, let’s reflect on what Hadoop is and how the cloud is impacting Hadoop.
In this article, you’ll:
- Get to know Hadoop
- Explore Hadoop on the cloud
- Look to the future and beyond with modern cloud platforms
Get to know Hadoop
Why was Hadoop a big deal?
Once upon a time, as our business grew, we started to generate too much data…
When all you want is simple steps to get good data scattered everywhere into a single location for quick business insights, don’t let the complexities of coding and infrastructure hold you back.
Knowing how to integrate data from various sources and perform simple transformation to address data quality issues is the first step towards extracting insights from big data. In this blog post, we will explore how to build and deploy simple ETL data pipelines without coding via Cloud Data Fusion on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
You’ll learn:
- Why do we need Cloud Data Fusion?
- How to build and deploy ETL pipelines with Cloud Data Fusion?
Why do we need Cloud Data Fusion?
The problem: Your first hurdle towards great insights from big data
Despite the rising popularity of sophisticated data analytics and machine learning techniques, something has never changed. The first hurdle towards great insights is usually data integration…
Computer vision has the potential to improve the consumer experience, reduce costs and enhance security. Understanding the fundamentals of computer vision is the first step towards unlocking a crucial competitive edge. Are you ready?
Computer vision is one of the most extraordinary gifts coming out of the artificial intelligence world. With computer vision, many companies have attempted to see the world through computers’ eyes and made great strides in solving complex business problems such as identifying product defects in real-time, verifying customers’ identification or automating insurance claims process. Overlooking such real-life applications of computer vision could represent missed opportunities to unlock growth, productivity and cost-savings for businesses. So what is computer vision and how can it help?
You’ll learn:
- What is computer vision?
- How is computer vision applied in today’s world?
- How do we…
