data analysis

Twenty years ago, data analytics was a field reserved for geeks and academics, something discussed during breaks in lectures on chaos theory. The idea was to take a very random system, with lots of seemingly disparate data, and be able to tie that tangled web of data together so that meaningful outcomes could be predicted. The most obvious example is weather forecasting, which involves analyzing all the earth’s atmospheric randomness in terms of ever-changing temperature, moisture, and wind, somehow using that data to tell people to bring an umbrella to that 1 pm picnic a week from Saturday.