Real Life Data Science Applications in Healthcare

Data Science Usage in Natural Disasters Predictions

Millions of people are affected by natural disasters each year. Wildfires, floods, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, are just the beginning of a long list of potential disasters. Some can last a few seconds, while others can last for weeks. However, their effects can be felt for decades or even longer, and impact the global economy, infrastructure, agriculture, and human health. The worst part is that the future impact of disasters will grow dramatically due to climate change. Some regions, which previously rarely suffered floods or wildfires, now regularly experience the effects of these natural disasters. Researchers have collected a large amount of data and developed models that predict disasters, but most of these models are far from perfect. For instance, the amount of data that is monitored by satellites and various ground sensors all over the world each minute is incredibly large, and therefore presents a major challenge for researchers. Having lots of information can be an asset, but data requires computational resources. As more data is collected, computational models become increasingly complex and slow. Furthermore, since just a few minutes’ notice in advance of a flood or wildfire can save people’s lives, predictive models must be able to work and do corrections in real time. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and approaches, like data mining, machine learning, and deep learning, can assist in disaster prediction. It is possible for AI to find hidden dependencies in data, which can be a basis for better understanding the mechanism of disasters, and, as a result, making better predictions. Good predictions and warnings reduce economic losses and save lives. We can’t stop most disasters, like floods, hurricanes, volcano eruptions, but we can be prepared for them. In this article, we will illustrate how data science can help in predicting different natural disasters.

Predictive Analysis in Business

Decision-making in business is often based on assumptions about the future. Many companies aspire to develop and deploy an effective process for understanding trends and relationships in their activity in order to gain forward-looking insight to drive business decisions and actions. This is called predictive analytics. We can define predictive analytics as a process that uses data and a set of sophisticated analytic tools to develop models and estimations of an environment's behavior in the future. In predictive analysis, the first step is to collect data. Depending on your target, varied sources are using, such as web archives, transaction data, CRM data, customer service data, digital marketing and advertising data, demographic data, machine-generated data (for example, telemetric data or data from sensors), and geographical data, among other options. It is important to have accurate and up to date information. Most of the time, you will have information from multiple sources and, quite often, it will be in a raw state. Some of it will be structured in tables, while the rest will be semi-structured or even unstructured, like social media comments. The next important step is to clean and organize the data - this is called data preprocessing. Preprocessing usually takes up 80% of the time and effort involved in all analysis. After this stage, we produce a model using already existing tools for predictive analytics. It is important to note that we use collected data to validate the model. Such an approach is based on the main assumption of predictive analytics, which claims that patterns in the future will be similar to the ones in the past. You must ensure that your model makes business sense and deploy the analytics results into your production system, software programs or devices, web apps, and so on. The model can only be valid for a certain time period, since reality is not static and an environment can change significantly. For example, the preferences of customers may change so fast that previous expectations become outdated. So, it is important to monitor a model periodically. There are plenty of applications for business based on predictive analytics. To conclude this article, we will briefly consider some of them.

How Can Data Science Help My Organization?

Nowadays, there is a tendency to hire data scientists or even form data science groups in companies. This does not only apply to specific activity sectors or large organizations. Small and midsize businesses are more frequently involving data scientists, in order to get actionable insights from collected information. So, how does data help to run and grow everyday businesses? There are several areas where collected data and the insights drawn from that data can have a significant impact on business.