Sharpening Analytic Focus to Cope with Big Data Volume and Variety

The growing volumes of time-stamped data available from sensors, social media sources, Web logs, and medical histories present remarkable opportunities for researchers and policy analysts. Although big data resources can provide valuable insights to help us understand complex systems and lead to better decisions for business, national security, cybersecurity, and healthcare, there are many challenges to dealing with the volume and variety of data. Data cleaning and data wrangling has received some attention with the development of application tools, but data focusing to sharpen the analytic focus remains a challenge. To address this challenge, this article provides a taxonomy of analytic focusing strategies for temporal event sequences.