MathBlock: Performing Complex Mathematical Operations on Synthetic Data

The use of systems to calculate mathematical operations has facilitated people to automate processes in the corporate sector. Such systems lie behind everything from calculating the final amount on a grocery receipt, to complex mathematical operations involving finding behaviors in a business's customers. However, when a company or organization has a large amount of data on which to perform mathematical operations, the procedure becomes time-consuming, whereas to execute mathematical operations on entire datasets, one typically needs strong programming skills. In this paper, a service called MathBlock is analyzed that is able to be used as a language agnostic mathematical expression parser and executioner, on batch data. MathBlock consists of four types of functions, including arithmetic, comparison, logical, and statistical. To evaluate the applicability of MathBlock, an experiment is carried out on the mentioned service as a proof of concept. This experimentation uses batch and synthetic data, covering the domains of maritime and healthcare, with the aim of performing mathematical operations through MathBlock. The derived results showcase that MathBlock can assist users on their need to calculate and gather results for many different datasets. Overall, it can be clearly stated that through MathBlock the challenge of the need to perform arithmetic, logical, comparison and statistical operations on different datasets to get results in an automated manner is well addressed, whereas additional experimentation with datasets from multiple domains should take place in order to conclude to more concrete and reliable results.