7 Derived Data, Synthetic Data & Analytics
This chapter covers
- Data Lineage: where does data comes from and what data is used to create new data
- The escalating hierarchy of data - from Raw Data to Data used in Optimization
- The current state of data generation, beyond human created data to machine generated data
- An Analytics Maturity Model illustrating analytics from simple dashboards to optimization
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.[1] – Mark Twain
People who watch and analyze technology for a living – technology analysts, journalists, editors, practitioners, academics and more discuss whether data or analytics is more important, as if the two are separable. And I suppose they are two separate topics/subjects that can be examined in isolation, but in the real world, if you want to make something of data or analytics, they tend to operate in tandem and one requires the other for any meaningful activity to take place.
When you think of data, when someone asks you about data, what do you think about? Do you see, ones and zeros, the typical representation that we see in the beginnings of movies and in graphic design treatments. That is binary, a zero or a one are the only options. It looks interesting when visualized in a stylistic manner.
Do you see data as text?
Do you think of data in all its multiplicity of forms?