by Angela Guess
A new survey has revealed some disconcerting opinions about the current state of Big Data solutions. The article states, “Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of R software, services and support, today released survey findings on the state of “Big Data” analytics. The company polled attendees this week at the Joint Statistical Meeting, the largest gathering of statisticians and data scientists in North America. The survey revealed nearly 97 percent of data scientists believe big data technology solutions need improvement and the top three obstacles data scientists foresee when running analytics on Big Data are: complexity of big data solutions; difficulty of applying valid statistical models to the data; and having limited insight into the meaning of the data.”
Other survey results included the following: “(1) When asked whether they expected their use of various analytics platforms (SPSS, SAS, R, S+, MATLAB) to decrease, stay the same, or increase over the next 24 months — only open source R registered a majority of ‘increased use’ responses with 47 percent. (2) Over 86 percent of statisticians polled consider themselves ‘data scientists’. (3) As an industry, there is no general agreement on how ‘Big Data’ should be defined. Survey results show factions of data scientists view the threshold of big data at a terabyte, a petabyte, or just above what can be reasonably managed for any given job.”
photo credit: Revolution Analytics
