Definition[edit]

The term big data has been in use since the 1990s, with some giving credit to John Mashey for
popularizing the term.[16][17] Big data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of
commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a tolerable
elapsed time.[18] Big data philosophy encompasses unstructured, semi-structured and structured
data, however the main focus is on unstructured data. [19] Big data "size" is a constantly moving target;
as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many zettabytes of data.[20] Big data requires a set
of techniques and technologies with new forms of integration to reveal insights from data-sets that
are diverse, complex, and of a massive scale.[21]
"Variety", "veracity", and various other "Vs" are added by some organizations to describe it, a
revision challenged by some industry authorities.[22] The Vs of big data were often referred to as the
"three Vs", "four Vs", and "five Vs". They represented the qualities of big data in volume, variety,
velocity, veracity, and value. [3] Variability is often included as an additional quality of big data.
A 2018 definition states "Big data is where parallel computing tools are needed to handle data", and
notes, "This represents a distinct and clearly defined change in the computer science used, via
parallel programming theories, and losses of some of the guarantees and capabilities made
by Codd's relational model."[23]
In a comparative study of big datasets, Kitchin and McArdle found that none of the commonly
considered characteristics of big data appear consistently across all of the analyzed cases. [24] For this
reason, other studies identified the redefinition of power dynamics in knowledge discovery as the
defining trait.[25] Instead of focusing on intrinsic characteristics of big data, this alternative perspective
pushes forward a relational understanding of the object claiming that what matters is the way in
which data is collected, stored, made available and analyzed.

Big data vs. business intelligence[edit]

The growing maturity of the concept more starkly delineates the difference between "big data" and
"business intelligence":[26]

 Business intelligence uses applied mathematics tools and descriptive statistics with data

with high information density to measure things, detect trends, etc.
 Big data uses mathematical analysis, optimization, inductive statistics, and concepts
from nonlinear system identification[27] to infer laws (regressions, nonlinear relationships,
and causal effects) from large sets of data with low information density [28] to reveal
relationships and dependencies, or to perform predictions of outcomes and behaviors. [27]
[29][promotional source?]

Characteristics[edit]

Shows the growth of big data's primary characteristics of volume, velocity, and variety
Big data can be described by the following characteristics:
Volume
The quantity of generated and stored data. The size of the data determines the value and
potential insight, and whether it can be considered big data or not. The size of big data is
usually larger than terabytes and petabytes.[30]
Variety
The type and nature of the data. The earlier technologies like RDBMSs were capable to
handle structured data efficiently and effectively. However, the change in type and nature
from structured to semi-structured or unstructured challenged the existing tools and
technologies. The big data technologies evolved with the prime intention to capture, store,
and process the semi-structured and unstructured (variety) data generated with high speed
(velocity), and huge in size (volume). Later, these tools and technologies were explored and
used for handling structured data also but preferable for storage. Eventually, the processing
of structured data was still kept as optional, either using big data or traditional RDBMSs. This
helps in analyzing data towards effective usage of the hidden insights exposed from the data
collected via social media, log files, sensors, etc. Big data draws from text, images, audio,
video; plus it completes missing pieces through data fusion.
Velocity
The speed at which the data is generated and processed to meet the demands and
challenges that lie in the path of growth and development. Big data is often available in real-
time. Compared to small data, big data is produced more continually. Two kinds of velocity
related to big data are the frequency of generation and the frequency of handling, recording,
and publishing.[31]
Veracity
The truthfulness or reliability of the data, which refers to the data quality and the data value.
[32]
 Big data must not only be large in size, but also must be reliable in order to achieve value
in the analysis of it. The data quality of captured data can vary greatly, affecting an accurate
analysis.[33]
Value
The worth in information that can be achieved by the processing and analysis of large
datasets. Value also can be measured by an assessment of the other qualities of big data.
[34]
 Value may also represent the profitability of information that is retrieved from the analysis
of big data.
Variability
The characteristic of the changing formats, structure, or sources of big data. Big data can
include structured, unstructured, or combinations of structured and unstructured data. Big
data analysis may integrate raw data from multiple sources. The processing of raw data may
also involve transformations of unstructured data to structured data.
Other possible characteristics of big data are:[35]
Exhaustive
Whether the entire system (i.e., =all) is captured or recorded or not. Big data may or may not
include all the available data from sources.
Fine-grained and uniquely lexical
Respectively, the proportion of specific data of each element per element collected and if the
element and its characteristics are properly indexed or identified.
Relational
If the data collected contains common fields that would enable a conjoining, or meta-
analysis, of different data sets.
Extensional
If new fields in each element of the data collected can be added or changed easily.
 Scalability
If the size of the big data storage system can expand rapidly.

Architecture[edit]
Big data repositories have existed in many forms, often
built by corporations with a special need. Commercial
vendors historically offered parallel database
management systems for big data beginning in the
1990s. For many years, WinterCorp published the
largest database report.[36][promotional source?]
Teradata Corporation in 1984 marketed the parallel
processing DBC 1012 system. Teradata systems were
the first to store and analyze 1 terabyte of data in
1992. Hard disk drives were 2.5 GB in 1991 so the
definition of big data continuously evolves according
to Kryder's law. Teradata installed the first petabyte
class RDBMS based system in 2007. As of 2017, there
are a few dozen petabyte class Teradata relational
databases installed, the largest of which exceeds 50
PB. Systems up until 2008 were 100% structured
relational data. Since then, Teradata has added
unstructured data types including XML, JSON, and
Avro.
In 2000, Seisint Inc. (now LexisNexis Risk Solutions)
developed a C++-based distributed platform for data
processing and querying known as the HPCC
Systems platform. This system automatically partitions,
distributes, stores and delivers structured, semi-
structured, and unstructured data across multiple
commodity servers. Users can write data processing
pipelines and queries in a declarative dataflow
programming language called ECL. Data analysts
working in ECL are not required to define data
schemas upfront and can rather focus on the particular
problem at hand, reshaping data in the best possible
manner as they develop the solution. In 2004,
LexisNexis acquired Seisint Inc.[37] and their high-speed
parallel processing platform and successfully used this
platform to integrate the data systems of Choicepoint
Inc. when they acquired that company in 2008.[38] In
2011, the HPCC systems platform was open-sourced
under the Apache v2.0 License.
CERN and other physics experiments have collected
big data sets for many decades, usually analyzed
via high-throughput computing rather than the map-
reduce architectures usually meant by the current "big
data" movement.
In 2004, Google published a paper on a process
called MapReduce that uses a similar architecture. The
MapReduce concept provides a parallel processing
model, and an associated implementation was
released to process huge amounts of data. With
MapReduce, queries are split and distributed across
parallel nodes and processed in parallel (the "map"
step). The results are then gathered and delivered (the
"reduce" step). The framework was very successful,
[39]
 so others wanted to replicate the algorithm.
Therefore, an implementation of the MapReduce
framework was adopted by an Apache open-source
project named "Hadoop".[40] Apache Spark was
developed in 2012 in response to limitations in the
MapReduce paradigm, as it adds the ability to set up
many operations (not just map followed by reducing).
MIKE2.0 is an open approach to information
management that acknowledges the need for revisions
due to big data implications identified in an article titled
"Big Data Solution Offering".[41] The methodology
addresses handling big data in terms of
useful permutations of data sources, complexity in
interrelationships, and difficulty in deleting (or
modifying) individual records.[42]
Studies in 2012 showed that a multiple-layer
architecture was one option to address the issues that
big data presents. A distributed parallel architecture
distributes data across multiple servers; these parallel
execution environments can dramatically improve data
processing speeds. This type of architecture inserts
data into a parallel DBMS, which implements the use
of MapReduce and Hadoop frameworks. This type of
framework looks to make the processing power
transparent to the end-user by using a front-end
application server.[43]
The data lake allows an organization to shift its focus
from centralized control to a shared model to respond
to the changing dynamics of information management.
This enables quick segregation of data into the data
lake, thereby reducing the overhead time. [44][45]

Technologies[edit]
A 2011 McKinsey Global Institute report characterizes
the main components and ecosystem of big data as
follows:[46]

 Techniques for analyzing data, such

as A/B testing, machine learning,
and natural language processing
 Big data technologies, like business
intelligence, cloud computing,
and databases
  Visualization, such as charts, graphs, and
other displays of the data
Multidimensional big data can also be represented
as OLAP data cubes or, mathematically, tensors. Array
database systems have set out to provide storage and
high-level query support on this data type. Additional
technologies being applied to big data include efficient
tensor-based computation,[47] such as multilinear
subspace learning,[48] massively parallel-processing
(MPP) databases, search-based applications, data
mining,[49] distributed file systems, distributed cache
(e.g., burst buffer and Memcached), distributed
databases, cloud and HPC-based infrastructure
(applications, storage and computing resources),[50] and
the Internet.[citation needed] Although, many approaches and
technologies have been developed, it still remains
difficult to carry out machine learning with big data. [51]
Some MPP relational databases have the ability to
store and manage petabytes of data. Implicit is the
ability to load, monitor, back up, and optimize the use
of the large data tables in the RDBMS.[52][promotional source?]
DARPA's Topological Data Analysis program seeks
the fundamental structure of massive data sets and in
2008 the technology went public with the launch of a
company called "Ayasdi".[53][third-party source needed]
The practitioners of big data analytics processes are
generally hostile to slower shared storage, [54] preferring
direct-attached storage (DAS) in its various forms from
solid state drive (SSD) to high capacity SATA disk
buried inside parallel processing nodes. The
perception of shared storage architectures—storage
area network (SAN) and network-attached
storage (NAS)— is that they are relatively slow,
complex, and expensive. These qualities are not
consistent with big data analytics systems that thrive
on system performance, commodity infrastructure, and
low cost.
Real or near-real-time information delivery is one of the
defining characteristics of big data analytics. Latency is
therefore avoided whenever and wherever possible.
Data in direct-attached memory or disk is good—data
on memory or disk at the other end of
an FC SAN connection is not. The cost of an SAN at
the scale needed for analytics applications is much
higher than other storage techniques.

Applications[edit]
 Bus wrapped with SAP big data parked outside IDF13.

Big data has increased the demand of information

management specialists so much so that Software
AG, Oracle
Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, EMC, HP,
and Dell have spent more than $15 billion on software
firms specializing in data management and analytics.
In 2010, this industry was worth more than $100 billion
and was growing at almost 10 percent a year: about
twice as fast as the software business as a whole. [5]
Developed economies increasingly use data-intensive
technologies. There are 4.6 billion mobile-phone
subscriptions worldwide, and between 1 billion and
2 billion people accessing the internet. [5] Between 1990
and 2005, more than 1 billion people worldwide
entered the middle class, which means more people
became more literate, which in turn led to information
growth. The world's effective capacity to exchange
information through telecommunication networks was
281 petabytes in 1986, 471 petabytes in 1993, 2.2
exabytes in 2000, 65 exabytes in 2007[10] and
predictions put the amount of internet traffic at 667
exabytes annually by 2014.[5] According to one
estimate, one-third of the globally stored information is
in the form of alphanumeric text and still image data,
[55]
 which is the format most useful for most big data
applications. This also shows the potential of yet
unused data (i.e. in the form of video and audio
content).
While many vendors offer off-the-shelf products for big
data, experts promote the development of in-house
custom-tailored systems if the company has sufficient
technical capabilities.[56]

Government[edit]
The use and adoption of big data within governmental
processes allows efficiencies in terms of cost,
productivity, and innovation,[57] but does not come
without its flaws. Data analysis often requires multiple
parts of government (central and local) to work in
collaboration and create new and innovative processes
to deliver the desired outcome. A common government
organization that makes use of big data is the National
Security Administration (NSA), which monitors the
activities of the Internet constantly in search for
potential patterns of suspicious or illegal activities their
system may pick up.
Civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) collects all
certificates status from birth to death. CRVS is a
source of big data for governments.

International development[edit]
Research on the effective usage of information and
communication technologies for development (also
known as "ICT4D") suggests that big data technology
can make important contributions but also present
unique challenges to international development.[58]
[59]
 Advancements in big data analysis offer cost-
effective opportunities to improve decision-making in
critical development areas such as health care,
employment, economic productivity, crime, security,
and natural disaster and resource management.[60][61]
[62]
 Additionally, user-generated data offers new
opportunities to give the unheard a voice.[63] However,
longstanding challenges for developing regions such
as inadequate technological infrastructure and
economic and human resource scarcity exacerbate
existing concerns with big data such as privacy,
imperfect methodology, and interoperability issues.
[60]
 The challenge of "big data for development"[60] is
currently evolving toward the application of this data
through machine learning, known as "artificial
intelligence for development (AI4D).[64]
Benefits[edit]
A major practical application of big data for
development has been "fighting poverty with data". [65] In
2015, Blumenstock and colleagues estimated
predicted poverty and wealth from mobile phone
metadata [66] and in 2016 Jean and colleagues
combined satellite imagery and machine learning to
predict poverty.[67] Using digital trace data to study the
labor market and the digital economy in Latin America,
Hilbert and colleagues [68][69] argue that digital trace data
has several benefits such as:

 Thematic coverage: including areas that

were previously difficult or impossible to
measure
 Geographical coverage: our international
sources provided sizable and comparable
data for almost all countries, including
 many small countries that usually are not
included in international inventories
 Level of detail: providing fine-grained data
with many interrelated variables, and new
aspects, like network connections
 Timeliness and timeseries: graphs can be
produced within days of being collected
Challenges[edit]
At the same time, working with digital trace data
instead of traditional survey data does not eliminate
the traditional challenges involved when working in the
field of international quantitative analysis. Priorities
change, but the basic discussions remain the same.
Among the main challenges are:

 Representativeness. While traditional

development statistics is mainly concerned
with the representativeness of random
survey samples, digital trace data is never
a random sample.[70]
 Generalizability. While observational data
always represents this source very well, it
only represents what it represents, and
nothing more. While it is tempting to
generalize from specific observations of
one platform to broader settings, this is
often very deceptive.
 Harmonization. Digital trace data still
requires international harmonization of
indicators. It adds the challenge of so-
called "data-fusion", the harmonization of
different sources.
 Data overload. Analysts and institutions
are not used to effectively deal with a large
number of variables, which is efficiently
done with interactive dashboards.
Practitioners still lack a standard workflow
that would allow researchers, users and
policymakers to efficiently and effectively.[68]
Healthcare[edit]
Big data analytics was used in healthcare by providing
personalized medicine and prescriptive analytics,
clinical risk intervention and predictive analytics, waste
and care variability reduction, automated external and
internal reporting of patient data, standardized medical
terms and patient registries.[71][72][73][74] Some areas of
improvement are more aspirational than actually
implemented. The level of data generated
within healthcare systems is not trivial. With the added
adoption of mHealth, eHealth and wearable
technologies the volume of data will continue to
increase. This includes electronic health record data,
imaging data, patient generated data, sensor data, and
other forms of difficult to process data. There is now an
even greater need for such environments to pay
greater attention to data and information quality. [75] "Big
data very often means 'dirty data' and the fraction of
data inaccuracies increases with data volume growth."
Human inspection at the big data scale is impossible
and there is a desperate need in health service for
intelligent tools for accuracy and believability control
and handling of information missed.[76] While extensive
information in healthcare is now electronic, it fits under
the big data umbrella as most is unstructured and
difficult to use.[77] The use of big data in healthcare has
raised significant ethical challenges ranging from risks
for individual rights, privacy and autonomy, to
transparency and trust.[78]
Big data in health research is particularly promising in
terms of exploratory biomedical research, as data-
driven analysis can move forward more quickly than
hypothesis-driven research.[79] Then, trends seen in
data analysis can be tested in traditional, hypothesis-
driven follow up biological research and eventually
clinical research.
A related application sub-area, that heavily relies on
big data, within the healthcare field is that of computer-
aided diagnosis in medicine. [80] For instance,
for epilepsy monitoring it is customary to create 5 to 10
GB of data daily. [81] Similarly, a single uncompressed
image of breast tomosynthesis averages 450 MB of
data. [82] These are just a few of the many examples
where computer-aided diagnosis uses big data. For
this reason, big data has been recognized as one of
the seven key challenges that computer-aided
diagnosis systems need to overcome in order to reach
the next level of performance. [83]

Education[edit]
A McKinsey Global Institute study found a shortage of
1.5 million highly trained data professionals and
managers[46] and a number of universities[84]
[better  source  needed]
 including University of Tennessee and UC
Berkeley, have created masters programs to meet this
demand. Private boot camps have also developed
programs to meet that demand, including free
programs like The Data Incubator or paid programs
like General Assembly.[85] In the specific field of
marketing, one of the problems stressed by Wedel and
Kannan[86] is that marketing has several sub domains
(e.g., advertising, promotions, product development,
branding) that all use different types of data.
Media[edit]
To understand how the media uses big data, it is first
necessary to provide some context into the mechanism
used for media process. It has been suggested by Nick
Couldry and Joseph Turow that practitioners in media
and advertising approach big data as many actionable
points of information about millions of individuals. The
industry appears to be moving away from the
traditional approach of using specific media
environments such as newspapers, magazines, or
television shows and instead taps into consumers with
technologies that reach targeted people at optimal
times in optimal locations. The ultimate aim is to serve
or convey, a message or content that is (statistically
speaking) in line with the consumer's mindset. For
example, publishing environments are increasingly
tailoring messages (advertisements) and content
(articles) to appeal to consumers that have been
exclusively gleaned through various data-
mining activities.[87]

 Targeting of consumers (for advertising by

marketers)[88]
 Data capture
 Data journalism: publishers and journalists
use big data tools to provide unique and
innovative insights and infographics.
Channel 4, the British public-service television
broadcaster, is a leader in the field of big data and data
analysis.[89]

Insurance[edit]
Health insurance providers are collecting data on
social "determinants of health" such as food and TV
consumption, marital status, clothing size, and
purchasing habits, from which they make predictions
on health costs, in order to spot health issues in their
clients. It is controversial whether these predictions are
currently being used for pricing. [90]

Internet of things (IoT)[edit]

Main article: Internet of things
Further information: Edge computing
Big data and the IoT work in conjunction. Data
extracted from IoT devices provides a mapping of
device inter-connectivity. Such mappings have been
used by the media industry, companies, and
governments to more accurately target their audience
and increase media efficiency. The IoT is also
increasingly adopted as a means of gathering sensory
data, and this sensory data has been used in medical,
[91]
 manufacturing[92] and transportation[93] contexts.
Kevin Ashton, the digital innovation expert who is
credited with coining the term,[94] defines the Internet of
things in this quote: "If we had computers that knew
everything there was to know about things—using data
they gathered without any help from us—we would be
able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce
waste, loss, and cost. We would know when things
needed replacing, repairing, or recalling, and whether
they were fresh or past their best."

Information technology[edit]
Especially since 2015, big data has come to
prominence within business operations as a tool to
help employees work more efficiently and streamline
the collection and distribution of information
technology (IT). The use of big data to resolve IT and
data collection issues within an enterprise is called IT
operations analytics (ITOA).[95] By applying big data
principles into the concepts of machine
intelligence and deep computing, IT departments can
predict potential issues and prevent them.[95] ITOA
businesses offer platforms for systems
management that bring data silos together and
generate insights from the whole of the system rather
than from isolated pockets of data.

Case studies[edit]
Government[edit]
China[edit]

 The Integrated Joint Operations Platform

(IJOP, 一体化联合作战平台) is used by the
government to monitor the population,
particularly Uyghurs.[96] Biometrics,
including DNA samples, are gathered
through a program of free physicals.[97]
 By 2020, China plans to give all its citizens
a personal "social credit" score based on
how they behave.[98] The Social Credit
System, now being piloted in a number of
Chinese cities, is considered a form
of mass surveillance which uses big data
analysis technology.[99][100]
India[edit]
  Big data analysis was tried out for
the BJP to win the 2014 Indian General
Election.[101]
 The Indian government uses numerous
techniques to ascertain how the Indian
electorate is responding to government
action, as well as ideas for policy
augmentation.
Israel[edit]

 Personalized diabetic treatments can be

created through GlucoMe's big data
solution.[102]
United Kingdom[edit]
Examples of uses of big data in public services:

 Data on prescription drugs: by connecting

origin, location and the time of each
prescription, a research unit was able to
exemplify and examine the considerable
delay between the release of any given
drug, and a UK-wide adaptation of
the National Institute for Health and Care
Excellence guidelines. This suggests that
new or most up-to-date drugs take some
time to filter through to the general patient.
[citation needed][103]

 Joining up data: a local authority blended

data about services, such as road gritting
rotas, with services for people at risk, such
as Meals on Wheels. The connection of
data allowed the local authority to avoid
any weather-related delay.[104]
United States[edit]

 In 2012, the Obama
administration announced the Big Data
Research and Development Initiative, to
explore how big data could be used to
address important problems faced by the
government.[105] The initiative is composed
of 84 different big data programs spread
across six departments.[106]
 Big data analysis played a large role
in Barack Obama's successful 2012 re-
election campaign.[107]
 The United States Federal
Government owns five of the ten most
powerful supercomputers in the world.[108][109]
  The Utah Data Center has been
constructed by the United States National
Security Agency. When finished, the facility
will be able to handle a large amount of
information collected by the NSA over the
Internet. The exact amount of storage
space is unknown, but more recent
sources claim it will be on the order of a
few exabytes.[110][111][112] This has posed
security concerns regarding the anonymity
of the data collected.[113]
Retail[edit]
 Walmart handles more than 1 million
customer transactions every hour, which
are imported into databases estimated to
contain more than 2.5 petabytes (2560
terabytes) of data—the equivalent of 167
times the information contained in all the
books in the US Library of Congress.[5]
 Windermere Real Estate uses location
information from nearly 100 million drivers
to help new home buyers determine their
typical drive times to and from work
throughout various times of the day.[114]
 FICO Card Detection System protects
accounts worldwide.[115]
Science[edit]
 The Large Hadron Collider experiments
represent about 150 million sensors
delivering data 40 million times per second.
There are nearly 600 million collisions per
second. After filtering and refraining from
recording more than 99.99995%[116] of these
streams, there are 1,000 collisions of
interest per second.[117][118][119]
o As a result, only working with
less than 0.001% of the sensor
stream data, the data flow from
all four LHC experiments
represents 25 petabytes
annual rate before replication
(as of 2012). This becomes
nearly 200 petabytes after
replication.
o If all sensor data were
recorded in LHC, the data flow
would be extremely hard to
work with. The data flow would
exceed 150 million petabytes
 annual rate, or nearly
500 exabytes per day, before
replication. To put the number
in perspective, this is
equivalent to
500 quintillion (5×1020) bytes
per day, almost 200 times
more than all the other sources
combined in the world.
 The Square Kilometre Array is a radio
telescope built of thousands of antennas. It
is expected to be operational by 2024.
Collectively, these antennas are expected
to gather 14 exabytes and store one
petabyte per day.[120][121] It is considered one
of the most ambitious scientific projects
ever undertaken.[122]
 When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)
began to collect astronomical data in 2000,
it amassed more in its first few weeks than
all data collected in the history of
astronomy previously. Continuing at a rate
of about 200 GB per night, SDSS has
amassed more than 140 terabytes of
information.[5] When the Large Synoptic
Survey Telescope, successor to SDSS,
comes online in 2020, its designers expect
it to acquire that amount of data every five
days.[5]
 Decoding the human genome originally
took 10 years to process; now it can be
achieved in less than a day. The DNA
sequencers have divided the sequencing
cost by 10,000 in the last ten years, which
is 100 times cheaper than the reduction in
cost predicted by Moore's law.[123]
 The NASA Center for Climate Simulation
(NCCS) stores 32 petabytes of climate
observations and simulations on the
Discover supercomputing cluster.[124][125]
 Google's DNAStack compiles and
organizes DNA samples of genetic data
from around the world to identify diseases
and other medical defects. These fast and
exact calculations eliminate any "friction
points", or human errors that could be
made by one of the numerous science and
biology experts working with the DNA.
DNAStack, a part of Google Genomics,
allows scientists to use the vast sample of
resources from Google's search server to
 scale social experiments that would usually
take years, instantly.[126][127]
 23andme's DNA database contains the
genetic information of over 1,000,000
people worldwide.[128] The company
explores selling the "anonymous
aggregated genetic data" to other
researchers and pharmaceutical
companies for research purposes if
patients give their consent.[129][130][131][132]
[133]
 Ahmad Hariri, professor of psychology
and neuroscience at Duke University who
has been using 23andMe in his research
since 2009 states that the most important
aspect of the company's new service is
that it makes genetic research accessible
and relatively cheap for scientists.[129] A
study that identified 15 genome sites linked
to depression in 23andMe's database lead
to a surge in demands to access the
repository with 23andMe fielding nearly 20
requests to access the depression data in
the two weeks after publication of the
paper.[134]
 Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and
hydrodynamic turbulence research
generate massive data sets. The Johns
Hopkins Turbulence Databases (JHTDB)
contains over 350 terabytes of
spatiotemporal fields from Direct Numerical
simulations of various turbulent flows. Such
data have been difficult to share using
traditional methods such as downloading
flat simulation output files. The data within
JHTDB can be accessed using "virtual
sensors" with various access modes
ranging from direct web-browser queries,
access through Matlab, Python, Fortran
and C programs executing on clients'
platforms, to cut out services to download
raw data. The data have been used in over
150 scientific publications.
Sports[edit]
Big data can be used to improve training and
understanding competitors, using sport sensors. It is
also possible to predict winners in a match using big
data analytics.[135] Future performance of players could
be predicted as well. Thus, players' value and salary is
determined by data collected throughout the season. [136]
In Formula One races, race cars with hundreds of
sensors generate terabytes of data. These sensors
collect data points from tire pressure to fuel burn
efficiency.[137] Based on the data, engineers and data
analysts decide whether adjustments should be made
in order to win a race. Besides, using big data, race
teams try to predict the time they will finish the race
beforehand, based on simulations using data collected
over the season.[138]

Technology[edit]
 eBay.com uses two data warehouses at
7.5 petabytes and 40PB as well as a
40PB Hadoop cluster for search, consumer
recommendations, and merchandising.[139]
 Amazon.com handles millions of back-end
operations every day, as well as queries
from more than half a million third-party
sellers. The core technology that keeps
Amazon running is Linux-based and as of
2005 they had the world's three largest
Linux databases, with capacities of 7.8 TB,
18.5 TB, and 24.7 TB.[140]
 Facebook handles 50 billion photos from
its user base.[141] As of June 2017,
Facebook reached 2 billion monthly active
users.[142]
 Google was handling roughly 100 billion
searches per month as of August 2012.[143]
COVID-19[edit]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, big data was raised
as a way to minimise the impact of the disease.
Significant applications of big data included minimising
the spread of the virus, case identification and
development of medical treatment. [144]
Governments used big data to track infected people to
minimise spread. Early adopters included China,
Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel. [145][146][147]

Research activities[edit]
Encrypted search and cluster formation in big data
were demonstrated in March 2014 at the American
Society of Engineering Education. Gautam Siwach
engaged at Tackling the challenges of Big Data by MIT
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory and Amir Esmailpour at the UNH Research
Group investigated the key features of big data as the
formation of clusters and their interconnections. They
focused on the security of big data and the orientation
of the term towards the presence of different types of
data in an encrypted form at cloud interface by
providing the raw definitions and real-time examples
within the technology. Moreover, they proposed an
approach for identifying the encoding technique to
advance towards an expedited search over encrypted
text leading to the security enhancements in big data.
[148]

In March 2012, The White House announced a

national "Big Data Initiative" that consisted of six
federal departments and agencies committing more
than $200 million to big data research projects.[149]
The initiative included a National Science Foundation
"Expeditions in Computing" grant of $10 million over
five years to the AMPLab[150] at the University of
California, Berkeley.[151] The AMPLab also received
funds from DARPA, and over a dozen industrial
sponsors and uses big data to attack a wide range of
problems from predicting traffic congestion[152] to
fighting cancer.[153]
The White House Big Data Initiative also included a
commitment by the Department of Energy to provide
$25 million in funding over five years to establish the
Scalable Data Management, Analysis and
Visualization (SDAV) Institute, [154] led by the Energy
Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The SDAV Institute aims to bring together the
expertise of six national laboratories and seven
universities to develop new tools to help scientists
manage and visualize data on the department's
supercomputers.
The U.S. state of Massachusetts announced the
Massachusetts Big Data Initiative in May 2012, which
provides funding from the state government and
private companies to a variety of research institutions.
[155]
 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosts
the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data
in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, combining government, corporate, and
institutional funding and research efforts.[156]
The European Commission is funding the two-year-
long Big Data Public Private Forum through their
Seventh Framework Program to engage companies,
academics and other stakeholders in discussing big
data issues. The project aims to define a strategy in
terms of research and innovation to guide supporting
actions from the European Commission in the
successful implementation of the big data economy.
Outcomes of this project will be used as input
for Horizon 2020, their next framework program.[157]
The British government announced in March 2014 the
founding of the Alan Turing Institute, named after the
computer pioneer and code-breaker, which will focus
on new ways to collect and analyze large data sets.[158]
At the University of Waterloo Stratford
Campus Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE)
Inspiration Day, participants demonstrated how using
data visualization can increase the understanding and
appeal of big data sets and communicate their story to
the world.[159]
Computational social sciences – Anyone can use
application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by
big data holders, such as Google and Twitter, to do
research in the social and behavioral sciences.
[160]
 Often these APIs are provided for free.[160] Tobias
Preis et al. used Google Trends data to demonstrate
that Internet users from countries with a higher per
capita gross domestic products (GDPs) are more likely
to search for information about the future than
information about the past. The findings suggest there
may be a link between online behaviors and real-world
economic indicators.[161][162][163] The authors of the study
examined Google queries logs made by ratio of the
volume of searches for the coming year (2011) to the
volume of searches for the previous year (2009), which
they call the "future orientation index".[164] They
compared the future orientation index to the per capita
GDP of each country, and found a strong tendency for
countries where Google users inquire more about the
future to have a higher GDP.
Tobias Preis and his colleagues Helen Susannah Moat
and H. Eugene Stanley introduced a method to identify
online precursors for stock market moves, using
trading strategies based on search volume data
provided by Google Trends.[165] Their analysis
of Google search volume for 98 terms of varying
financial relevance, published in Scientific Reports,
[166]
 suggests that increases in search volume for
financially relevant search terms tend to precede large
losses in financial markets.[167][168][169][170][171][172][173]
Big data sets come with algorithmic challenges that
previously did not exist. Hence, there is seen by some
to be a need to fundamentally change the processing
ways.[174]
The Workshops on Algorithms for Modern Massive
Data Sets (MMDS) bring together computer scientists,
statisticians, mathematicians, and data analysis
practitioners to discuss algorithmic challenges of big
data.[175] Regarding big data, such concepts of
magnitude are relative. As it is stated "If the past is of
any guidance, then today's big data most likely will not
be considered as such in the near future." [80]
Sampling big data[edit]
A research question that is asked about big data sets
is whether it is necessary to look at the full data to
draw certain conclusions about the properties of the
data or if is a sample is good enough. The name big
data itself contains a term related to size and this is an
important characteristic of big data.
But sampling enables the selection of right data points
from within the larger data set to estimate the
characteristics of the whole population. In
manufacturing different types of sensory data such as
acoustics, vibration, pressure, current, voltage, and
controller data are available at short time intervals. To
predict downtime it may not be necessary to look at all
the data but a sample may be sufficient. Big data can
be broken down by various data point categories such
as demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and
transactional data. With large sets of data points,
marketers are able to create and use more customized
segments of consumers for more strategic targeting.
There has been some work done in sampling
algorithms for big data. A theoretical formulation for
sampling Twitter data has been developed. [176]

Critique[edit]
Critiques of the big data paradigm come in two flavors:
those that question the implications of the approach
itself, and those that question the way it is currently
done.[177] One approach to this criticism is the field
of critical data studies.

Critiques of the big data

paradigm[edit]
"A crucial problem is that we do not know much about
the underlying empirical micro-processes that lead to
the emergence of the[se] typical network
characteristics of Big Data."[18] In their critique, Snijders,
Matzat, and Reips point out that often very strong
assumptions are made about mathematical properties
that may not at all reflect what is really going on at the
level of micro-processes. Mark Graham has leveled
broad critiques at Chris Anderson's assertion that big
data will spell the end of theory:[178] focusing in
particular on the notion that big data must always be
contextualized in their social, economic, and political
contexts.[179] Even as companies invest eight- and nine-
figure sums to derive insight from information
streaming in from suppliers and customers, less than
40% of employees have sufficiently mature processes
and skills to do so. To overcome this insight deficit, big
data, no matter how comprehensive or well analyzed,
must be complemented by "big judgment", according to
an article in the Harvard Business Review.[180]
Much in the same line, it has been pointed out that the
decisions based on the analysis of big data are
inevitably "informed by the world as it was in the past,
or, at best, as it currently is".[60] Fed by a large number
of data on past experiences, algorithms can predict
future development if the future is similar to the past.
[181]
 If the system's dynamics of the future change (if it is
not a stationary process), the past can say little about
the future. In order to make predictions in changing
environments, it would be necessary to have a
thorough understanding of the systems dynamic, which
requires theory.[181] As a response to this critique
Alemany Oliver and Vayre suggest to use "abductive
reasoning as a first step in the research process in
order to bring context to consumers' digital traces and
make new theories emerge".[182] Additionally, it has
been suggested to combine big data approaches with
computer simulations, such as agent-based
models[60] and complex systems. Agent-based models
are increasingly getting better in predicting the
outcome of social complexities of even unknown future
scenarios through computer simulations that are based
on a collection of mutually interdependent algorithms.
[183][184]
 Finally, the use of multivariate methods that
probe for the latent structure of the data, such as factor
analysis and cluster analysis, have proven useful as
analytic approaches that go well beyond the bi-variate
approaches (cross-tabs) typically employed with
smaller data sets.
In health and biology, conventional scientific
approaches are based on experimentation. For these
approaches, the limiting factor is the relevant data that
can confirm or refute the initial hypothesis.[185] A new
postulate is accepted now in biosciences: the
information provided by the data in huge volumes
(omics) without prior hypothesis is complementary and
sometimes necessary to conventional approaches
based on experimentation.[186][187] In the massive
approaches it is the formulation of a relevant
hypothesis to explain the data that is the limiting factor.
[188]
 The search logic is reversed and the limits of
induction ("Glory of Science and Philosophy
scandal", C. D. Broad, 1926) are to be considered.[citation
needed]

Privacy advocates are concerned about the threat to

privacy represented by increasing storage and
integration of personally identifiable information; expert
panels have released various policy recommendations
to conform practice to expectations of privacy.[189][190]
  The misuse of big data in several cases by media,
[191]

companies, and even the government has allowed for

abolition of trust in almost every fundamental institution
holding up society.[192]
Nayef Al-Rodhan argues that a new kind of social
contract will be needed to protect individual liberties in
the context of big data and giant corporations that own
vast amounts of information, and that the use of big
data should be monitored and better regulated at the
national and international levels.[193] Barocas and
Nissenbaum argue that one way of protecting
individual users is by being informed about the types of
information being collected, with whom it is shared,
under what constraints and for what purposes. [194]

Critiques of the "V" model[edit]

The "V" model of big data is concerning as it centers
around computational scalability and lacks in a loss
around the perceptibility and understandability of
information. This led to the framework of cognitive big
data, which characterizes big data applications
according to:[195]

 Data completeness: understanding of the

non-obvious from data
 Data correlation, causation, and
predictability: causality as not essential
requirement to achieve predictability
 Explainability and interpretability: humans
desire to understand and accept what they
understand, where algorithms do not cope
with this
 Level of automated decision making:
algorithms that support automated decision
making and algorithmic self-learning
Critiques of novelty[edit]
Large data sets have been analyzed by computing
machines for well over a century, including the US
census analytics performed by IBM's punch-card
machines which computed statistics including means
and variances of populations across the whole
continent. In more recent decades, science
experiments such as CERN have produced data on
similar scales to current commercial "big data".
However, science experiments have tended to analyze
their data using specialized custom-built high-
performance computing (super-computing) clusters
and grids, rather than clouds of cheap commodity
computers as in the current commercial wave, implying
a difference in both culture and technology stack.
Critiques of big data execution[edit]
Ulf-Dietrich Reips and Uwe Matzat wrote in 2014 that
big data had become a "fad" in scientific research.
[160]
 Researcher danah boyd has raised concerns about
the use of big data in science neglecting principles
such as choosing a representative sample by being too
concerned about handling the huge amounts of data.
[196]
 This approach may lead to results that have
a bias in one way or another.[197] Integration across
heterogeneous data resources—some that might be
considered big data and others not—presents
formidable logistical as well as analytical challenges,
but many researchers argue that such integrations are
likely to represent the most promising new frontiers in
science.[198] In the provocative article "Critical Questions
for Big Data",[199] the authors title big data a part
of mythology: "large data sets offer a higher form of
intelligence and knowledge [...], with the aura of truth,
objectivity, and accuracy". Users of big data are often
"lost in the sheer volume of numbers", and "working
with Big Data is still subjective, and what it quantifies
does not necessarily have a closer claim on objective
truth".[199] Recent developments in BI domain, such as
pro-active reporting especially target improvements in
the usability of big data, through
automated filtering of non-useful data and correlations.
[200]
 Big structures are full of spurious
correlations[201] either because of non-causal
coincidences (law of truly large numbers), solely nature
of big randomness[202] (Ramsey theory), or existence
of non-included factors so the hope, of early
experimenters to make large databases of numbers
"speak for themselves" and revolutionize scientific
method, is questioned.[203]
Big data analysis is often shallow compared to analysis
of smaller data sets.[204] In many big data projects, there
is no large data analysis happening, but the challenge
is the extract, transform, load part of data pre-
processing.[204]
Big data is a buzzword and a "vague term",[205][206] but at
the same time an "obsession"[206] with entrepreneurs,
consultants, scientists, and the media. Big data
showcases such as Google Flu Trends failed to deliver
good predictions in recent years, overstating the flu
outbreaks by a factor of two. Similarly, Academy
awards and election predictions solely based on
Twitter were more often off than on target. Big data
often poses the same challenges as small data; adding
more data does not solve problems of bias, but may
emphasize other problems. In particular data sources
such as Twitter are not representative of the overall
population, and results drawn from such sources may
then lead to wrong conclusions. Google Translate—
which is based on big data statistical analysis of text—
does a good job at translating web pages. However,
results from specialized domains may be dramatically
skewed. On the other hand, big data may also
introduce new problems, such as the multiple
comparisons problem: simultaneously testing a large
set of hypotheses is likely to produce many false
results that mistakenly appear significant. Ioannidis
argued that "most published research findings are
false"[207] due to essentially the same effect: when many
scientific teams and researchers each perform many
experiments (i.e. process a big amount of scientific
data; although not with big data technology), the
likelihood of a "significant" result being false grows fast
– even more so, when only positive results are
published. Furthermore, big data analytics results are
only as good as the model on which they are
predicated. In an example, big data took part in
attempting to predict the results of the 2016 U.S.
Presidential Election[208] with varying degrees of
success.

Critiques of big data policing and

surveillance[edit]
Big data has been used in policing and surveillance by
institutions like law enforcement and corporations.
[209]
 Due to the less visible nature of data-based
surveillance as compared to traditional methods of
policing, objections to big data policing are less likely
to arise. According to Sarah Brayne's Big Data
Surveillance: The Case of Policing,[210] big data policing
can reproduce existing societal inequalities in three
ways:

 Placing suspected criminals under

increased surveillance by using the
justification of a mathematical and
therefore unbiased algorithm
 Increasing the scope and number of
people that are subject to law enforcement
tracking and exacerbating existing racial
overrepresentation in the criminal justice
system
 Encouraging members of society to
abandon interactions with institutions that
would create a digital trace, thus creating
obstacles to social inclusion
If these potential problems are not corrected or
regulated, the effects of big data policing may continue
to shape societal hierarchies. Conscientious usage of
big data policing could prevent individual level biases
from becoming institutional biases, Brayne also notes.