revealing relationships in your population is useful across industries whether it's for recommending films based on the habits of folks in a taste cluster, identifying crime hot spots within urban areas, or grouping return-related financial investments to ensure a diversified portfolio spans clusters.

Big data and traditional analytics Big data Traditional analytics Type of data Unstructured formats Formatted in rows and columns Volume of data 100 terabytes to petabytes Tens of terabytes or less Flow of data Constant flow of data Static pool of data Analysis methods Machine learning Hypothesis-based Primary purpose Data-based products Internal d

PROS now often incorporate external, and somewhat less structured, data into the algorithm. For example, a PROS user in the oil industry can incorporate weather data (which would influence consumer demand) and competitor prices, which can often be scraped from the internet, into pricing algorithms.