The above screenshot shows an initial analysis (in Microsoft Power BI) of 1,723,099 records of New York taxi trip records uploaded to the cloud. The top chart shows a scatter plot of Trip Distance in miles against the Total Fare Amount (in US $). This useful chart shows straightaway that there are some outliers in the data (e.g. some trips cost over $1,000 despite being only for short distances). These records are almost certainly errors (where e.g. the fare was entered with the decimal point in the wrong place, e.g. $1000.00 instead of $10.00) and should be corrected or removed. Similar errors in the Trip Distance fields had already been removed in that 2 records had implausible distance values (e.g. 300,833 miles for a total fare of $14.16, and 1,666 miles for a total fare of $10.30).
In order to analyse big data, it often needs to be moved from its original sources (e.g. separate csv or txt files, or a stream) to somewhere where it can be collated and processed (e.g. an online database, or Microsoft PowerBI, or an xdf, extensible data format, file that can be analysed by Microsoft R Server).
Read More “Uploading Big Data: it’s very different from normal data”