The Economist explains: The backlash against big data

“Bollocks”, says a Cambridge professor. “Hubris,” write researchers at Harvard. “Big data is bullshit,” proclaims Obama’s reelection chief number-cruncher. A few years ago almost no one had heard of “big data”. Today it’s hard to avoid — and as a result, the digerati love to condemn it. Wired, Time, Harvard Business Review and other publications are falling over themselves to dance on its grave. “Big data: are we making a big mistake?,” asks the Financial Times. “Eight (No, Nine!) Problems with Big Data,” says the New York Times. What explains the big-data backlash?Big data refers to the idea that society can do things with a large body of data that that weren’t possible when working with smaller amounts. The term was originally applied a decade ago to massive datasets from astrophysics, genomics and internet search engines, and to machine-learning systems (for voice-recognition and translation, for example) that work well only when given lots of data to chew on. Now it refers to the application of data-analysis and statistics in new areas, from retailing to human resources. The backlash began in mid-March, prompted by an article in Science by David Lazer and others at Harvard and Northeastern University. It showed that a big-data poster-child — Google Flu Trends, a 2009 project which identified flu outbreaks from search queries alone — had overestimated the number of cases for four years running, compared with reported data from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC). This led to a wider attack on the idea of big data.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/04/economist-explains-10