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5 Amazing Things Big Data Helps Us To Predict Now -- Plus What's On The Horizon

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Big data is predicting things about your life almost every minute of your day — whether you’re aware of it or not.

Amazon is predicting what else you might like to buy every time you shop. Netflix is predicting what you might want to watch. Google is predicting how you will respond to your emails. And Match.com and other dating sites are even trying to predict who you might fall in love with.

These predictions have become so ubiquitous that we don’t always even notice them any more. But data analysts are working on predicting much more important outcomes than the next show you’ll binge watch, with some very exciting results.

  1. High School Dropouts

    In the U.S., nearly one in five students won’t graduate from high school, and not having a high school diploma handicaps them for life in terms of earning potential and career advancement. For years, districts have relied on anecdotal evidence to develop their own specific early warning systems for students at risk of dropping out, but big data is creating a much more scientific, systematic approach to identifying those students early and maximize limited intervention resources by targeting those students who are most at-risk first.

  2. Weather

    Given the increasing amounts of IoT sensors we now have, particularly in smartphones, we have more data than ever about the weather in very specific places. It used to be that people outside a major metropolitan area had to rely on looking out the window to see what the weather was like. But today, big data can provide accurate snapshots of current weather practically anywhere in the world, and use that information to make ever more accurate predictions.

  3. Cyber attacks

    All this data has to live somewhere, namely, the cloud. And when you have valuable data, security becomes a concern. But data can also help you predict and stop a cyber attack. Computers can be tasked with analyzing the number of login attempts or how certain assets are accessed, and send an alert when suspicious behavior is detected so that humans can come in and take precautions.

  4. Health and disease

    Science has learned a lot about which risk factors are associated with which diseases. For example, people who develop metabolic syndrome (sometimes called prediabetes) are at high risk of developing type II diabetes. And one company has developed an algorithm that can look at your health history, screening tests, and demographics and can predict who is at risk and then provide personalized exercise, weight management, and care management programs tailored to those individuals. Predictions like this could soon be available for more diseases and complications that have clear risk factors.

  5. Police misconduct

    The Center for Data Science and Public Policy says that big data can be used to look at a variety of factors — from stress levels to the types of cases they’ve been responding to — and predict when an officer is at risk for a negative interaction with the public. If these sorts of predictive analyses were used regularly, if an officer responded to an unusually high number of domestic abuse, homicide, or suicide cases, they could be given additional psychological support, time off, or other preemptive interventions to help prevent that stress from resulting in misconduct.

Elections?  Olympic titles? The World Cup?

No data analysts I know of are claiming that they have algorithms that can accurately predict the outcome of every election — especially not in these tumultuous political times — yet we have more data than ever about people’s unguarded opinions through social media channels. Large scale big data projects aimed at predicting major social events are underway and history has shown that the more we experiment and the smarter deep learning algorithms get, the more likely it is that we will be able to predict the outcome of major events with accuracy.

Of course, as computer predictions become more accurate and specific, we run into issues of privacy and individual rights, but handled appropriately, the potential benefits for individuals and society at large are huge — and growing all the time.

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