Chapter 21: Getting Value from Mining Big Data

The past two decades have been dominated by the emergence of increasingly powerful and less expensive ubiquitous computing, as well as the large use of the web and mobile technologies. Due to such advances in information technology and distributed computing, digital data volumes are growing exponentially in many fields of human activities. This phenomenon concerns scientific disciplines as well as industry and commerce. Such technological development has also generated a whole new set of challenges: the world is drowning in a huge quantity of data, which is still growing very rapidly both in the volume and complexity…