Key features of big data

It was McKinsey, a world-renowned consulting firm, who first proposed the arrival of the "big data" era. According to McKinsey, data has penetrated into every industry and business function area today and has become an important factor of production. People's mining and application of massive data heralds the arrival of a new wave of productivity growth and consumer surplus.

In fact, big data has been used for a long time in the fields of physics, biology, environmental ecology and other industries, as well as military, finance, communication and other industries, but it is only slightly niche. It was not until recent years with the development of the Internet and the information industry that it has attracted people's attention.

Big data mainly has four characteristics, namely Volume, Variety, Velocity, and Value.

1. Volume

It refers to the huge volume of data. As time goes by, the storage unit ranges from GB to TB in the past, and even the current PB and EB levels. Alibaba currently generates and processes data at the PB level (1 PB equals 1024*1024 G of data). Such large-scale data requires intelligent algorithms, powerful data processing platforms, and new data processing technologies for statistics, analysis, prediction, and real-time processing.

2. Variety

A wide range of data sources determines the diversity of big data forms. The data types are not only in the form of text, but also in pictures, videos, audios, geographic location information and other types of data.

3. Velocity

The generation of big data is very fast, and it is mainly transmitted through the Internet. It also has very strict requirements on processing speed, and it is necessary to quickly obtain high-value information from various types of data. The growth rate and processing speed of data are important manifestations of the high speed of big data.

4. Value

Among the data generated in the real world, valuable data account for a very small proportion. Taking video as an example, for an hour of video, during the uninterrupted monitoring process, the potentially useful data is only one or two seconds.

Big data is considered to be a new analytical tool to rediscover and understand the world, which will change the way and thinking mode of people to understand and explore the world, and prediction is one of the biggest uses of big data.

With the deep integration of information technology and human production and life, and the rapid popularization of the Internet, global data has shown the characteristics of explosive growth and massive accumulation, which has had a major impact on economic development, social progress, national governance, and people's lives. There is a large amount of valuable information hidden in big data, but at the same time, it also contains many interference factors. Therefore, mining and analyzing the value of data and removing the false and preserving the true is the key to maximizing the value of data.