Analytics Magazine Analytics Magazine, July/August 2014 | Page 40

REAL - T IME T E X T A NA LY T I C S Figure 1: Real-time text mining agency. of topic streams. Streams are constantly monitored for the rate of arrival of tweets. Whenever there is a burst of tweets in a particular topic stream, an alert for the trending topic is generated. THE REAL-TIME EDGE A multi-agent distributed framework enables the processing of real-time data and facilitates decision-making by allowing for easy deployment of analytical tasks in the form of process flows. In this multi-agent paradigm, an agent is a software program designed to carry out one or more tasks and can communicate with other agents in the system using agent communication language. Thus, an 40 | A N A LY T I C S - M A G A Z I N E . O R G analytical task can be written as an agent, and the analytical process flow can be established by wiring together a set of communicating agents (an agency) that can run in sequence or in parallel. These agents were written using R to offer the analyst the benefits of a powerful and flexible statistical modeling language. OPERATIONALIZATION IN THE CLOUD The entire real-time platform was then deployed on a cloud ecosystem to allow for the following processes: Efficient resource management: The cloud platform provides the necessary virtual machine, network bandwidth and other W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G