12.4 Real-time and Streaming Analytics

7 min readjuly 30, 2024

Real-time and revolutionize how businesses handle data. By processing information as it arrives, companies can make quick decisions and respond to changes instantly. This approach is crucial for tasks like fraud detection and predictive maintenance.

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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Implementing comes with challenges. Dealing with high-speed data, ensuring quality, and integrating with existing systems are key hurdles. However, technologies like and Kafka help overcome these obstacles, enabling powerful streaming analytics solutions.

Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Real-time and Streaming Analytics

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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Introduction to Real-time and Streaming Analytics

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  • Real-time analytics involves processing and analyzing data as it is generated or received, enabling immediate insights and decision-making
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Streaming analytics focuses on continuous processing and analysis of data streams from various sources, such as sensors, social media, or transaction logs
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Real-time and streaming analytics are crucial for applications that require low- responses, such as fraud detection, predictive maintenance, or real-time recommendations
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Real-time analytics enables organizations to respond quickly to changing conditions, optimize processes, and improve customer experiences
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Challenges and Considerations

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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Key challenges in real-time and streaming analytics include handling high-velocity data, ensuring , and integrating with existing systems and workflows
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • High-velocity data requires efficient data ingestion and processing mechanisms to handle the rapid influx of data without causing bottlenecks or delays
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Data quality is critical in real-time analytics to ensure accurate insights and decision-making, necessitating data cleansing, validation, and techniques
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Integrating real-time analytics with existing systems and workflows involves considerations such as data compatibility, latency requirements, and scalability of the overall architecture
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Real-time analytics often requires a shift in organizational mindset and processes to leverage the insights effectively and drive timely actions based on the real-time data
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Streaming Data Technologies

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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Apache Spark and Flink

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  • Apache Spark is a distributed computing framework that supports real-time data processing through its Spark Streaming module, which enables micro-batch processing of data streams
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Spark Streaming divides the incoming data stream into small batches and processes them using the Spark engine, allowing for fault-tolerant and scalable stream processing
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • is a stream processing framework that provides low-latency, high-throughput processing of real-time data streams, with support for stateful computations and event-time processing
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Flink's architecture is designed for true stream processing, enabling processing of individual events as they arrive, rather than relying on micro-batches like Spark Streaming
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Apache Kafka and Other Technologies

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  • Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that enables real-time data ingestion, storage, and processing, often used in combination with Spark or Flink for end-to-end streaming pipelines
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Kafka acts as a message broker, allowing multiple producers to write data to Kafka topics and multiple consumers to read from those topics, enabling decoupling and scalability of the streaming architecture
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Other technologies for real-time and streaming analytics include , , and , each with its own strengths and use cases
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Apache Storm is a distributed real-time computation system that processes streams of data with low latency, while Apache Samza is a distributed stream processing framework that integrates closely with Kafka
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed streaming data service that enables real-time processing of large-scale data streams in the cloud, providing scalability and ease of use
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Choosing the Right Technology Stack

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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Choosing the right technology stack depends on factors such as data volume, processing requirements, latency constraints, and integration with existing systems
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Data volume and velocity influence the choice of technologies that can handle the scale and throughput of the data streams effectively
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Processing requirements, such as stateful computations, event-time processing, or complex transformations, guide the selection of frameworks like Flink or Spark that provide the necessary capabilities
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Latency constraints dictate the need for true stream processing frameworks like Flink for ultra-low latency applications or the acceptability of micro-batch processing with Spark Streaming
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Integration with existing systems, such as data stores, message queues, or analytics platforms, influences the compatibility and interoperability of the chosen streaming technologies
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Real-time Analytics Pipelines

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Designing a Real-time Analytics Pipeline

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  • Identify the business problem and define the goals and requirements for the real-time analytics solution, considering factors such as data sources, processing logic, and output destinations
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Design the architecture of the real-time analytics pipeline, including data ingestion, stream processing, data storage, and visualization components
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Select the appropriate technologies and frameworks based on the requirements, such as Apache Kafka for data ingestion, Apache Flink for stream processing, and Elasticsearch for real-time data storage and querying
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Consider the scalability, fault-tolerance, and high availability aspects of the pipeline architecture to ensure reliable and uninterrupted processing of streaming data
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Implementing and Testing the Pipeline

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  • Implement the data ingestion layer to collect and stream data from various sources, such as IoT devices, log files, or social media APIs, ensuring data quality and consistency
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Develop the stream processing logic using the chosen framework, applying transformations, aggregations, and operations to extract insights and generate real-time alerts or notifications
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Integrate the real-time analytics pipeline with downstream systems, such as dashboards, alerting mechanisms, or machine learning models, to enable actionable insights and decision-making
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Test and validate the pipeline to ensure data accuracy, performance, and scalability, and iterate on the design and implementation based on feedback and changing requirements
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Establish monitoring and logging mechanisms to track the health and performance of the pipeline, detect anomalies or failures, and enable troubleshooting and optimization
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Machine Learning for Streaming Data

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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Challenges and Approaches

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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Streaming data poses unique challenges for machine learning, such as concept drift, limited processing time, and resource constraints, requiring specialized approaches and algorithms
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Concept drift refers to the change in the underlying data distribution over time, which can degrade the performance of machine learning models trained on historical data
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Limited processing time in real-time scenarios necessitates efficient and algorithms that can update models on-the-fly as new data arrives
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Resource constraints, such as memory and computational power, require algorithms that can operate with limited resources while still providing accurate predictions
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Online Learning and Ensemble Methods

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  • Online learning algorithms, such as stochastic gradient descent or incremental learning, can adapt to streaming data by updating the model incrementally as new data arrives, allowing for real-time predictions
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Online learning enables continuous learning and adaptation of models without the need to retrain from scratch, making it suitable for scenarios with evolving data patterns
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Ensemble methods, such as or online boosting, can improve the accuracy and robustness of predictions by combining multiple models trained on different subsets of the data stream
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Ensemble methods leverage the diversity and complementarity of multiple models to mitigate the impact of concept drift and enhance the overall predictive performance
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Anomaly Detection and Concept Drift Handling

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  • Anomaly detection techniques, such as streaming k-means clustering or online support vector machines, can identify unusual patterns or outliers in real-time data streams, enabling proactive responses to potential issues
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Anomaly detection helps in identifying fraudulent activities, system failures, or unexpected behaviors in real-time, allowing for timely interventions and mitigations
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Concept drift detection methods, such as adaptive windowing or drift detectors, can identify and adapt to changes in the underlying data distribution, ensuring the relevance and accuracy of the machine learning models over time
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Drift detection techniques monitor the performance of models and trigger model updates or retraining when significant changes in data patterns are observed, maintaining the effectiveness of the models in dynamic environments
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics

Integration with Real-time Analytics Pipelines

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  • Integrating machine learning models into a real-time analytics pipeline requires careful consideration of data preprocessing, feature engineering, model deployment, and monitoring to ensure reliable and efficient predictions on streaming data
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Data preprocessing and feature engineering techniques need to be adapted to handle streaming data, such as incremental feature extraction or online data normalization
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Model deployment in a streaming context involves considerations such as model serialization, versioning, and serving infrastructure to enable real-time predictions with low latency
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Top images from around the web for Real-time and Streaming Analytics
  • Monitoring the performance and quality of machine learning models in production is crucial to detect deviations, concept drift, or model degradation and trigger appropriate actions, such as model retraining or updating

Key Terms to Review (24)

Amazon Kinesis: Amazon Kinesis is a cloud-based platform provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed for real-time processing of streaming data at scale. It enables users to collect, process, and analyze data streams in real-time, making it ideal for use cases such as log and event data collection, clickstream analysis, and monitoring application performance. Its integration with other AWS services enhances its capabilities for building robust analytics solutions.
Anomaly Detection: Anomaly detection is the process of identifying rare items, events, or observations that raise suspicions by differing significantly from the majority of the data. In the context of real-time and streaming analytics, it plays a crucial role in monitoring data as it flows to detect unexpected patterns or outliers, which can indicate issues such as fraud, system faults, or security breaches.
Apache Flink: Apache Flink is an open-source stream processing framework designed for real-time data processing and analytics. It allows for the processing of data streams with high throughput and low latency, making it ideal for applications that require immediate insights from continuously flowing data. Flink's ability to handle event time and stateful computations further enhances its capacity to manage complex event-driven architectures.
Apache Samza: Apache Samza is an open-source stream processing framework designed for real-time data processing, enabling developers to handle large volumes of data in motion. It integrates seamlessly with Apache Kafka and Apache Hadoop, providing a robust infrastructure for building applications that require low-latency processing of streaming data, making it ideal for real-time and streaming analytics.
Apache Spark: Apache Spark is an open-source distributed computing framework designed for fast and efficient processing of large-scale data. It supports various data processing tasks like batch processing, interactive queries, streaming analytics, and machine learning, making it a powerful tool for handling big data workloads across different environments.
Apache Storm: Apache Storm is an open-source distributed real-time computation system designed for processing large streams of data quickly and efficiently. It allows for the processing of data in real-time, enabling organizations to make decisions based on the most current information, which is crucial for applications like fraud detection and social media analytics.
Complex event processing: Complex event processing (CEP) is a technology used to analyze and process large volumes of data in real-time to identify patterns, correlations, and trends that occur across multiple events. It plays a vital role in real-time and streaming analytics by allowing organizations to react quickly to emerging situations, facilitating timely decision-making based on the dynamic nature of data streams.
Dan Ariely: Dan Ariely is a prominent behavioral economist known for his research on how people make decisions and the irrationality behind their choices. His work often explores how emotions, cognitive biases, and social influences impact decision-making, which is particularly relevant in understanding real-time and streaming analytics as businesses gather data on consumer behavior to make informed choices instantly.
Data enrichment: Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing data by supplementing it with additional information from external sources to improve its value and context. This enhancement can lead to more insightful analysis, better decision-making, and improved outcomes by providing a fuller picture of the data being analyzed.
Data quality: Data quality refers to the condition of a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables, often judged by factors such as accuracy, completeness, reliability, and relevance. High data quality is crucial for making informed decisions, driving business applications, ensuring effective analytics processes, harnessing big data technologies, and fostering a data-driven culture within organizations.
Data streaming: Data streaming is the continuous flow of data generated from various sources, allowing for real-time processing and analysis. This concept is crucial for applications that require immediate insights and decision-making, as it enables organizations to process large volumes of data on the fly. By leveraging data streaming, businesses can respond to events as they happen, enhancing their ability to deliver timely services and optimize operations.
Data velocity: Data velocity refers to the speed at which data is generated, processed, and analyzed. This characteristic is critical in real-time and streaming analytics, as it involves handling data flows that come in rapidly from various sources, such as social media, sensors, and transaction systems. The ability to process data at high speeds allows organizations to derive insights and make decisions almost instantaneously, thus enhancing operational efficiency and responsiveness.
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load): ETL is a data integration process that involves extracting data from various sources, transforming it into a suitable format, and loading it into a target database or data warehouse. This process is crucial for preparing data for analysis and reporting, especially in environments that require real-time and streaming analytics, where timely access to accurate data is essential for decision-making.
Event-driven analytics: Event-driven analytics is a method of analyzing data in real-time by focusing on events or changes in data streams as they occur. This approach allows organizations to respond instantly to significant occurrences, leveraging immediate insights for decision-making and operational efficiency. It integrates well with technologies that enable continuous data processing and provides the capability to monitor and act on business events in a timely manner.
Google Cloud Dataflow: Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed service for stream and batch processing of data in real-time. It enables users to execute data pipelines, allowing for efficient handling of large datasets with complex transformations, making it a go-to solution for real-time and streaming analytics tasks.
Incremental learning: Incremental learning is a machine learning approach where the model is continuously updated as new data becomes available, instead of being trained on a static dataset. This method allows systems to adapt to changes over time, making it particularly effective in real-time and streaming analytics environments where data is generated continuously and can be highly dynamic.
Latency: Latency refers to the time delay between a stimulus and the response to that stimulus, particularly in the context of data processing and transmission. In real-time and streaming analytics, low latency is crucial as it allows for immediate insights and actions based on incoming data streams, enhancing decision-making processes and overall system performance.
Operational Intelligence: Operational intelligence refers to the real-time analysis and monitoring of data to improve decision-making, optimize business processes, and enhance performance. It helps organizations gain insights from their operations by processing data from various sources as it is generated, enabling timely actions based on the latest information. This capability is essential in today's fast-paced environment, where immediate response to events can provide a significant competitive advantage.
Real-time analytics: Real-time analytics refers to the process of continuously analyzing and processing data as it is generated, allowing organizations to make immediate decisions based on up-to-the-minute information. This approach leverages technologies and methodologies that enable data collection, analysis, and visualization in a live environment, thus facilitating rapid responses to changing conditions. It plays a crucial role in various fields by enhancing operational efficiency, improving customer experiences, and driving timely strategic decisions.
Real-time dashboards: Real-time dashboards are visual displays that present current and up-to-date information from various data sources, allowing users to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics in an instant. These dashboards are designed to provide a quick overview of critical data, facilitating timely decision-making and proactive management. They are often used in contexts that require immediate insights, such as operations monitoring, financial analysis, and customer service tracking.
Streaming analytics: Streaming analytics is the process of continuously analyzing and processing data in real-time as it is generated, enabling organizations to gain immediate insights and make quick decisions. This approach allows businesses to respond to changing conditions, detect patterns, and derive actionable intelligence from live data streams, which is crucial in today's fast-paced digital environment.
Streaming random forests: Streaming random forests are an adaptation of the random forest algorithm specifically designed for real-time data processing and analytics. This technique allows for continuous learning and model updating as new data flows in, making it particularly valuable for applications that require immediate insights from constantly changing datasets.
Thomas Davenport: Thomas Davenport is a prominent figure in the field of data analytics and business intelligence, known for his contributions to the understanding and application of analytics in organizations. He emphasizes the importance of using data-driven decision-making to enhance business performance and has written extensively on how companies can leverage analytics for competitive advantage.
Windowing: Windowing is a technique used in real-time and streaming analytics to manage and organize incoming data streams by breaking them into manageable chunks or 'windows.' This method allows for the efficient processing of continuous data flows, enabling analysts to perform computations over specified time intervals or conditions, thereby facilitating the extraction of insights from dynamic datasets.
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