Gartner, predicts that by 2025, 70 per cent of organisations will shift their focus from big to small and wide data, providing more context for analytics and making artificial intelligence (AI) less data hungry.
“Disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic are causing historical data that reflects past conditions to quickly become obsolete, which is breaking many production AI and machine learning (ML) models,” said Jim Hare, Research Vice President, Gartner.
Gartner analysts discussed new data and analytics (D&A) techniques to build a resilient, adaptable and data literate organisation during the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2021, which is taking place virtually in EMEA through Thursday.
D&A leaders need to turn to new analytics techniques known as ‘small data’ and ‘wide data’. “Taken together they are capable of using available data more effectively, either by reducing the required volume or by extracting more value from unstructured, diverse data sources,” added Hare.
Small data is an approach that requires less data but still offers useful insights. The approach includes certain time-series analysis techniques or few-shot learning, synthetic data, or self-supervised learning.
Wide data enables the analysis and synergy of a variety of small and large, unstructured, and structured data sources. It applies X analytics, with X standing for finding links between data sources, as well as for a diversity of data formats. These formats include tabular, text, image, video, audio, voice, temperature, or even smell and vibration.
Potential areas where small and wide data can be used are demand forecasting in retail, real-time behavioural and emotional intelligence in customer service applied to hyper-personalisation and customer experience improvement.
Other areas include physical security or fraud detection and adaptive autonomous systems, such as robots, which constantly learn by the analysis of correlations in time and space of events in different sensory channels.