Descriptive Analytics and Visualization in today’s market

- Nimesh Jain

In today's rapidly growing technologically advanced world, we always come across the story of how data is changing the face of the industry. From predicting crop harvest for a small farmer in India to helping Apple Inc. in the USA boost its revenue.

But why data is the new oil for any economy?

In general, data is any sort of facts and figures collected by different sources that symbolize qualitative, quantitative, or any other aspects of any subject or a group of factors affecting any subject. And we have seen over the past few years, development of technology such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT) has been set up based on the data available to turn the raw data into insights and eventually actions. However, as we talk about the rapid and ever-growing data, it is not only growing in size but also quality and richness. In the current scenario, the physical world is connected to the digital world through the use of digitalization which can generate diverse data as well.

As per the experts of the matter, the one having the most diverse and insightful data will be the one surviving in the end. Companies like Google provide free access to their analytics libraries, but secure on their data tightly itself as the best of today's market is: all value is in data.

We see that once data is collected, stored, and cleaned in a systematic manner using different techniques supported by other factors, some useful insights, and actionable items formulated based on the set of data, known as information. In this context, Descriptive Analysis plays an important role in this part as it focuses on gathering and summarizing the relevant data into an easily readable, understandable, and interpretable manner. This type of analysis has been used across the range of industries. It serves as a base to processes such as business intelligence and machine learning which further create a foundation for further analysis and understanding of the environment and human actions.

Descriptive Analysis is usually the easier way to seek answers to questions such as:

1. What happened?
2. Why did it happen?
3. What were the reasons that it happened?

After answering the above questions in quantitative aspects, the resultant information can be further used for Visualization such as Pir charts, line graphs, bar charts, scatter plots. etc.

Is it the need of the hour to use the Descriptive Analysis and Visualization in today's dynamic market? 

Even without knowing it, most businesses and organizations use both the tools in most of their operations daily. Ranging from store manager to keep a track of the inventory to the C-Suite, taking important strategic decisions for the growth and profit of an organization, everyone needs to analyze and visualize data.

As a common saying goes, data is to the business what blood is to the human body. As this blood (data) circulates through different techniques and processes in the organization, it becomes the backbone of every decision that a company makes and what it does in the market to grow and sustain.

For example, Google Maps, one of the most popular maps and positioning software int the industry uses both Descriptive Analysis and Visualization. If a user wants to find a restaurant nearby, using Descriptive Analysis, the backend algorithms will generate a list of restaurants int he area of the user and filter out the closet ones (as per person's preference). The data will be visually displayed on the screen in the form of highest to lowest rating places or simply on a map showing the distance required to cover to reach any filtered place.

In the current scenario also, the country wise data related to the COVID patients, recoveries, and deaths are analyzed and visualized in many forms to provide meaningful information and this helps Organisations, Government bodies, etc. tot ake relevant decisions to safeguard the citizens.

Descriptive Analysis and Visualization are interconnected processes. While descriptie analysis organises, summarises and describes data into manageable information and simple to understand facts helpful for decision making, data visualization means to convert the processed data into visual form which is even easier to read and understand.

The process which starts from a descriptive analysis of data is important to understand from the prespective that descriptive analysis focuses on data itself rather than the inplications in the actual world beyond the information presented by the data. Some examples of descriptive analysis techniques include central tendency measures, frequency, a measure of position, and variation of dispersion.

Descriptive Analysis helps to organize all the mess and clutter of huge meaningful data, converting the data into meaningful and readable format, This is very crucial process that forms the basis for data visualization.

The next step of data visualization includes converting the analyzed data into visuals. Apart from statistical analysis, visualization tells a quick story and helps to compare different factors of study quickly and easily. From a business perspective , data visualization is crucial to make sure that all the stakeholders are at the dame level of understanding for a given data. What some data scientists might be able to look and figure out of data might be hard for decision making teams in a company to read and understand and this is where data visualization comes to rescue.

With these vital pieces, businesses suddenlu become much more versatile. With the data visually displayed for everyone to understand, companies can identify untapped markets where their products or services might flourish . They can determine which parts of a company's operations can be made more efficient, thus cutting down on costs amd optimizing overall performance. They may also identify ways to improve the customer experience by getting real-time feedback from customers. Business can even prepare for future growth or possible downturns, keeping orgainzations ahead of hte curve and ready to handle all the opportunities and challenges the await them.

Descriptive Analysis and Visualization will help companies of all sizes in making and preparing for making the decision-making process easier for all good and bad sorts of situations.

A Sample of Descriptive Analysis and Visualisation using MS Excel

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Author: Nimesh Jain