Big Data And Usage Of Predictive Analytics

Introduction

The advancement in technology and introduction of new technological processes has made the human life much simpler than ever. From inventing a computer to complex uses of Artificial Intelligence, we have definitely transformed in a desirable sense. Today, the development of Artificial Intelligence has led the different sectors of any economy to utilise big data analytics for making various inferences about the probable happenings in future and base their policies accordingly.

What Is Big Data?

In simple words, Big Data can be understood as a large amount of information which is to be analysed to arrive at some useful conclusion. Big Data Analytics is referred to as a complex process of examining the big data to reveal some hidden correlations within the data. Among the different type of Big Data Analytics, Predictive Analytics is the most commonly used technique by various artificial intelligence experts. It is a forward-looking analytics technique, which helps in forecasting the future activities on the basis of data set available at present.

Applications :

Big data is used by companies, law enforcement organisations and even the political parties for varied purposes. Predictive analytics play a major role in the examination of big data by different organisations. Some of the applications of Predictive Analytics are mentioned below:

• Forecasting sales to optimise the product mix: Nowadays, predictive analytics is performed by different companies in order to observe the behaviour of their potential customers, thus predicting a fall or rise in their sales. These firms can reframe their pricing and output policies on the basis of the inferences drawn from the big data available.
• Predicting the optimum campaigning strategy for political parties: Various political parties also make use of big data analytics to predict their performance by analysing various households in different constituencies and form their campaigning strategies accordingly.
• Recruiting top talent: Different firms are constantly in a competition with each other to recruit the best talent. They often analyse the performance of their competitors and their employee related policies on the basis of data collected through their competitors’ websites, official records and other sources.

Case Study- Elections And Big Data

It is an undisputable fact that the current Lok Sabha elections involved extensive use of Big Data by different political parties to understand the demographic variations in various constituencies. This data is arrived at by a study of the behaviour of different groups of people on social media.

The parties, along with various research agencies also conduct pre polls and exit polls to predict the election results in advance. The predictive analytics approach followed for these poll predictions therefore use both the information drawn from open sources as well as by personal interaction (publicly sourced information as well as HUMINT).

Innefu & Elections

On scrutinising a large number we tracked large amount of publicly available data, Innefu along with Times Now found the Anti-EVM account scam happening in the political scenario. In order to reduce the confidence in EVMs and pressurise the Election Commission, about 300 such accounts were created in a single day. These accounts presented false experiences of EVM tampering. A sudden rise in number of such new accounts being created smelled suspicion which our team verified.

Conclusion

We, at Innefu are dedicated towards ensuring cyber security. Successful application of predictive analytics using open source intelligence has helped us provide solutions to many hidden problems.