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Big Data: Are We Making a Big Mistake?

Amid the big data frenzy, it is easy to get so bedazzled by its seemingly limitless potential that one overlooks common pitfalls when applying it. At times like this, it is more important to see big data as what it is not: big insights.

• The “big data” that interests many companies is what we might call “found data”, the digital exhaust (called ‘data exhaust’) of web searches, credit card payments and mobiles pinging the nearest phone mast.
• “There are a lot of small data problems that occur in big data,” says Spiegelhalter. “They don’t disappear because you’ve got lots of the stuff. They get worse.”
• Google’s engineers weren’t trying to figure out what caused what. They were merely finding statistical patterns in the data. They cared about ­correlation rather than causation. This is common in big data analysis. Figuring out what causes what is hard (impossible, some say). Figuring out what is correlated with what is much cheaper and easier. Correlation does not imply causation. 
• But a theory-free analysis of mere correlations is inevitably fragile. If you have no idea what is behind a correlation, you have no idea what might cause that correlation to break down.
• One explanation of the Flu Trends failure is that the news was full of scary stories about flu in December 2012 and that these stories provoked internet searches by people who were healthy. Another possible explanation is that Google’s own search algorithm moved the goalposts when it began automatically suggesting diagnoses when people entered medical symptoms.
• Sampling error is when a randomly chosen sample doesn’t reflect the underlying population purely by chance; sampling bias is when the sample isn’t randomly chosen at all. George Gallup took pains to find an unbiased sample because he knew that was far more important than finding a big one.
• what Street Bump really produces, left to its own devices, is a map of potholes that systematically favours young, affluent areas where more people own smartphones. (found data contain systematic biases and it takes careful thought to spot and correct for those biases.)
• big data do not solve the problem that has obsessed statisticians and scientists for centuries: the problem of insight, of inferring what is going on, and figuring out how we might intervene to change a system for the better.

Big data has arrived, but big insights have not.

(source)