Communications of the ACM
The Rise of Big Data
"Big Data" does not just refer to large quantities of data, but also to the ability to turn previously unquantified information into data.
Credit: Dataversity
Big data is transforming the way people experience the world and enabling them to learn things that in the past would have been impossible, offering a potential that could rival that of the Internet. This phenomenon is relatively new because as recently as 2000 only a quarter of stored information was digital, compared with today's figure of more than 98 percent.
Big data does not merely refer to a quantity of information, but also to the ability to turn previously unquantified information into data. This "datafication" of the world, combined with cost-effective computer memory, powerful processors, smart algorithms, and improved software, is driving efforts to provide enough data to a computer to enable it to infer the probability of an event, which is taking the place of trying to teach a computer to complete a task.
Making use of big data requires three major shifts in approach to data. First, using big data requires the collection and use of a large amount of data rather than small amounts or samples. Second, imperfect data is acceptable because a huge volume of data of variable quality produces greater results than a small quantity of clean, exact data. Finally, the focus with big data should be in finding correlations rather than causes.
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