As you delve into the world of data analytics, it’s important to understand the key

processes involved in achieving the desired outcomes. That’s why we’ve created
a data analytics project cycle, a set of standard data-driven processes designed
to guide you in effectively leading data to insights. By following this cycle, you’ll
be able to achieve your goals efficiently and effectively, starting with identifying
data analytics problems, designing and collecting datasets, and moving on to
data analytics and visualization. To help you visualize the process, we’ve
included a diagram of the data analytics project life cycle stages. So let’s dive in
and explore the world of data analytics!

The data analytics project life cycle stages are seen in the following diagram:

Here are the Important stages:

1. Identifying the right problem statements for your Business Problem

2. Designing the right dataset for the problem statement
3. Start Collecting and Processing the data for your Algorithms or Tools
4. Performing analytics over your data
5. Visualizing the data with analysed output

Failure

Ignoring the importance of following the standard data analytics life cycle may lead you
to miss important business insights and fail to achieve the project outcome. This is
because many different parties are involved, from defining the problem to collecting the
right data, obtaining insights, and presenting it to the right persons who need to be
motivated based on data signals.

👀 Quick eye

Let’s get some perspective on these stages for performing data analytics.

Step 1 - Identifying the Business Problem:

Today, business analytics trends change by performing data analytics over web
datasets for growing businesses. Since their data size is increasing gradually day
by day, their analytical application needs to be scalable for collecting insights
from their datasets.

With the help of web analytics; we can solve business analytics problems. Let’s
assume that we have a large e-commerce website, and we want to know how to
increase the business. We can identify the important pages of our website by
categorizing them as per popularity into high, medium, and low. Based on these
popular pages, their types, their traffic sources, and their content, we will be able
to decide the roadmap to improve business by improving web traffic, as well as
the content.
Step 2 - Designing the data requirements:
To perform the data analytics for a specific problem, it needs datasets from
related domains. Based on the domain and problem specification, the data
source can be decided, and based on the problem definition; the data attributes
of these datasets can be defined.

Tip

Designing Data requirement is one of the important step because with this step we are
going to create virtual environment with data which is representative of the real world for
which we are going to solve the problem.

For example, if we are going to perform social media analytics (problem

specification), we use the data source as Facebook or Twitter. For identifying the
user characteristics, we need user profile information, likes, and posts as data
attributes.

Step 3 - Preprocessing Data:

In organizations all can not use the same data sources, data attributes for the
different use cases, it has to be different because there are variety of the
reasons. The raw data cant be directly used for the analytics it could result into
wrong conclusion hence it can impact to business decisions. All the required data
attributes are coming from variety of data sources and there is dedicated team
which can write applications to collect the data who are not going to use this data
in future so they don’t care much on the data accuracy until they get the right
feedback from the analytics team. And thats real true.

Tip

Unlock the true potential of your data with effective data preprocessing! Dive into the
significance of meticulous cleaning and transformation, essential steps that lay the
foundation for extracting valuable insights and ensuring the success of your data-driven
endeavors.

Because when the data is being collected its not prepared in a way such that it
can be directly used with in Data Science or Data Analytics algorithms. This
leads us to the perform various data operations such as following,

1. Data Cleansing
2. Data Aggregation
3. Data Transformation
4. Deriving Additional Data Attribute with help of existing ones
5. Data Augmentation
6. Data Sorting
7. Treating Data Outliers
8. Data Formatting
9. Handling Edge cases

Lets learn more about the above processes,

1. Data Cleansing: This involves identifying and correcting or removing any

errors, inconsistencies, or irrelevant data in a dataset. This process helps to
ensure that the data is accurate and reliable for analysis.
2. Data Aggregation: This involves combining data from multiple sources or
grouping data based on certain criteria, such as time periods or categories.
This process helps to simplify the data and make it easier to analyze.
3. Data Transformation: This involves converting data from one format to
another or applying mathematical or statistical operations to the data to
create new variables or features. This process helps to prepare the data for
analysis and make it more meaningful.
4. Deriving Additional Data Attribute with help of existing ones: This involves
using existing variables or features in a dataset to create new variables or
features that provide additional insights into the data. This process helps to
uncover hidden patterns or relationships in the data.
5. Data Augmentation: This involves adding new data to an existing dataset to
increase its size or diversity. This process helps to improve the accuracy and
robustness of the analysis.
6. Data Sorting: This involves arranging data in a specific order, such as
alphabetically or numerically, based on one or more variables or features.
This process helps to make the data easier to understand and analyze.
7. Treating Data Outliers: This involves identifying and dealing with data points
that are significantly different from the rest of the data. This process helps to
prevent these outliers from skewing the analysis.
8. Data Formatting: This involves converting data from one format to another,
such as changing a date from a string to a datetime object. This process
helps to ensure that the data is in a consistent and usable format for analysis.
9. Handling Edge cases: This involves dealing with data points that are at the
extremes of the distribution or are otherwise difficult to analyze. This process
helps to ensure that these cases are appropriately accounted for in the
analysis.

If you are looking to which roles are there to handle the above data processing
operations, I would recommend you to go through this post on – Difference
between Data Analyst and Data Scientist roles.

To provide the data in a supported format to all the data tools as well as
algorithms that will be used in the data analytics. In simple terms, preprocessing
is used to perform data operations to translate data into a fixed data format
before providing data to algorithms or tools. The data analytics process will then
be initiated with this formatted data as the input.

In the case of Big Data, the datasets need to be formatted and uploaded to
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and used further by various nodes with
Mappers and Reducers in Hadoop clusters.

Step 4 - Performing Analytics over data:

Once your data is in the right format, the next step is to perform
data analytics operations using the appropriate tools. These operations are
essential for discovering meaningful information from data that can aid in making
better decisions and solving business problems through data mining concepts.
There are two main types of analytics that can be used for business intelligence:
Descriptive Analytics and Predictive Analytics.

Tip

Discover the magic of data analytics! Learn to find patterns and gain valuable insights
from raw information. Turn data into stories that help you make smart decisions and get
ahead.
Descriptive Analytics is used to summarize and describe the properties of a
dataset, providing insights into what has happened in the past. This type of
analysis helps in understanding patterns and relationships within the data,
allowing analysts to identify key trends and characteristics that can guide
decision-making.

On the other hand, Predictive Analytics is used to forecast future outcomes

based on historical data, using statistical modeling and machine learning
algorithms to identify patterns and relationships that can be used to make
predictions. This type of analysis helps in anticipating what is likely to happen in
the future, which can guide decision-making and enable businesses to prepare
for potential outcomes.

To perform analytics, a variety of machine learning and custom algorithmic

concepts can be used, such as regression, classification, clustering, and model-
based recommendation. In the case of Big Data, the same algorithms can be
translated into MapReduce algorithms for running on Hadoop clusters, by
translating their data analytics logic to the MapReduce job to be run over Hadoop
clusters. These models must be evaluated and improved through various stages
of machine learning concepts. Optimized algorithms can provide better insights,
leading to more informed decision-making.

About trending techniques on Analytics

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that enables computer systems to

automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. It
involves the use of algorithms and statistical models to analyze and draw insights from
data, which can then be used to make predictions or decisions.

Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to
model and solve complex problems, such as image recognition and natural language
processing. These neural networks are designed to simulate the structure and function
of the human brain, allowing them to learn and improve from experience.

Large language models, such as GPT-3, are a type of deep learning model that is
specifically designed for language processing tasks. These models are trained on
massive amounts of text data, allowing them to understand and generate human-like
language.

Advance analytics usecases for eCommerce domain

1. Recommendation Systems - Personalized product suggestions on Amazon based

on your history.
2. Personalized Marketing - Targeted ads and emails tailored to your preferences.
3. Dynamic Pricing - Real-time price adjustments based on demand and inventory.
4. Fraud Detection - AI analyzing transactions to identify and prevent fraud.

These usecases can be considered as Predictive Analytics usecases which are

focusing on future.

Step 5 - Visualizing Data and Outcomes:

Data visualization is a simple and effective way to comprehend data and analyze
outcomes, without the need for complex measurements or analysis. It enables
easy exploration of data based on the chart type used for the specific data type.
There are various tools available for data visualization, including open-source
and paid enterprise-level tools. Once you input the data, select the attributes or
columns and define the chart type, you can easily view the distribution of data.

Data visualization is also crucial for displaying the output of data analytics to
business stakeholders, enabling them to understand the power of data and the
results of a data analytics project in the form of comparisons or distributions. It is
an interactive way to represent data insights, and take appropriate actions on top
of that. There are various software tools and R packages available for data
visualization. R has a range of packages specifically designed for visualizing
datasets.

Info

In recent years, data visualization has become increasingly popular and many new tools
have emerged to meet the growing demand. Some of the most popular data
visualization tools include:

1. Tableau: A powerful and user-friendly tool that allows users to create interactive
dashboards and visualizations. It offers a wide range of data connectors, making it
easy to import data from various sources.
2. Power BI: Microsoft’s data visualization tool that offers a range of features including
data modeling, dashboard creation, and collaboration capabilities. It integrates
seamlessly with other Microsoft tools, such as Excel and SharePoint.
3. QlikView/Qlik Sense: A popular tool for business intelligence and data visualization,
Qlik offers powerful data discovery and visualization capabilities. Its Associative
Engine technology allows users to make connections between data sets easily.
4. D3.js: A JavaScript library for creating dynamic and interactive visualizations
programmatically in web browsers. It offers a range of visualization types, including
bar charts, line charts, and scatter plots.
5. Plotly: An open-source Python data visualization library that offers a range of chart
types, including scatter plots, line charts, and 3D plots programmatically. It offers an
intuitive interface for creating interactive visualizations.
As a data analytics beginner, it’s important to familiarize yourself with these tools
and their capabilities to improve your data visualization skills. By using these
tools effectively, you can create compelling and insightful visualizations that
effectively communicate your data insights to stakeholders.

It’s important to maintain a professional tone in your writing when discussing data
analytics, as this is a technical field that requires attention to detail and accuracy.
When writing about data visualization tools, it’s important to highlight their key
features and benefits in a clear and concise manner, while also providing
examples of how they can be used effectively. This will help your readers
understand the value of these tools and how they can be applied in their own
data analytics projects.

(Image is taken from Medium)

You might have heard of Dashboard, that's nothing but the collection of data
charts composition into a single page. This Dashboard can be useful for tracking
the Business KPIs on real-time bases so Business Owners/Managers can track
the current business state and take appropriate decision for their future plans.
With this they don’t need to spend the additional efforts in writing SQL query to
get the data from database, clean the data and transform the data. They will just
look at the Dashboards/Charts prepared by the Data Science/Analytics team.
Hence Data Visualization is one of the main and last important stage where it
can serve the ultimate goal to business stakeholders with respect to original
problem definition.

Success
Congratulations!! on successfully understanding what is Data Analytics project life
cycle. Deep dive into other pages to understand other aspects of Data Analytics. Now,
Lets take some actions to get yourself onboaded with Data Analytics journey. All the
best!