Critique

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. One approach to this criticism is the field of critical data studies.

Critiques of the big data paradigmedit

"A crucial problem is that we do not know much about the underlying empirical micro-processes that lead to the emergence of these typical network characteristics of Big Data". 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: focusing in particular on the notion that big data must always be contextualized in their social, economic, and political contexts. 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.

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". Fed by a large number of data on past experiences, algorithms can predict future development if the future is similar to the past. 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. 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". Additionally, it has been suggested to combine big data approaches with computer simulations, such as agent-based models 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. 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. 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. In the massive approaches it is the formulation of a relevant hypothesis to explain the data that is the limiting factor. 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. The misuse of Big Data in several cases by media, companies and even the government has allowed for abolition of trust in almost every fundamental institution holding up society.

Nayef Al-Rodhan argues that a new kind of social contract will be needed to protect individual liberties in a context of Big Data and giant corporations that own vast amounts of information. The use of Big Data should be monitored and better regulated at the national and international levels. 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 constrains and for what purposes.

Critiques of the 'V' modeledit

The 'V' model of Big Data is concerting as it centres 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 application according to:

• 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 don't cope with this;
• Level of automated decision making: algorithms that support automated decision making and algorithmic self-learning;

Critiques of noveltyedit

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 executionedit

Ulf-Dietrich Reips and Uwe Matzat wrote in 2014 that big data had become a "fad" in scientific research. 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. This approach may lead to results that have bias in one way or another. 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. In the provocative article "Critical Questions for Big Data", 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". Recent developments in BI domain, such as pro-active reporting especially target improvements in usability of big data, through automated filtering of non-useful data and correlations. Big structures are full of spurious correlations either because of non-causal coincidences (law of truly large numbers), solely nature of big randomness (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.

Big data analysis is often shallow compared to analysis of smaller data sets. 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.

Big data is a buzzword and a "vague term", but at the same time an "obsession" 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" 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 with varying degrees of success.

Critiques of big data policing and surveillanceedit

Big Data has been used in policing and surveillance by institutions like law enforcement and corporations. Due to the less visible nature of data-based surveillance as compared to traditional method of policing, objections to big data policing are less likely to arise. According to Sarah Brayne's Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing, 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 regulating, the effects of big data policing continue to shape societal hierarchies. Conscientious usage of big data policing could prevent individual level biases from becoming institutional biases, Brayne also notes.