In an election every vote counts, but figuring out which votes to go after is becoming a huge focus for many campaigns. A well organized team has to solve several problems. The team needs to plan on where and when to spend money in order to maximize their “dollars per vote”. It’s also very important for a candidate’s team to understand their demographics and figure out how to maximize their votes. These problems can be solved through the use of Big Data.
Big Data is a very broad term that refers to the collection and analysis of large amounts of data. According to IBM there are four main dimensions to Big Data, volume, variety, veracity, and the velocity of analysing data. These dimensions show the wide range of Big Data and the large amount of possibilities for application. Big Data is being embraced by companies to help analyse and improve themselves. Virgin Atlantic’s IT director David Bulum said in an interview “We can get upwards of half a terabyte of data from a single flight from all of the different devices which are internet connected,”. Their planes have sensors that record various statistics about each flight.
Virgin could then analyse this data in order to find weaknesses or patterns. After a company collects large amounts of data they need to find ways to data mine. According to Oracle the key properties of data mining include the discovery of patterns, prediction of outcomes, creation of actionable information, and a focus on large data sets and databases. The outcome of data mining heavily depends on how algorithms are formulated and implemented. When data mining teams need to understand how to model and evaluate their data as well as take into consideration where the data is coming from. The use of Big .
. large amounts of information on the populous. It’s true that increasing voter turnout in generally good for democracy, but privacy is becoming a major concern. Throughout the primaries and into the 2016 election big data analytics will ramp up for both parties, New tactics and strategies will likely come into play. The future of Data Mining will be interesting with the always growing computational power and our knowledge on how to use it. Having a big data team will become a requirement for any businesses or candidate team for any election.
Therefore it is important for the population to understand how data is being gathered and to prevent personal information from being exploited. However in the future big data could also be useful for the voter when figuring out which candidate to choose. Whatever happens the value for information in politics can only increase.
