Philosophising Data: A Critical Reflection On The ‘Hidden' Issues

2. Big Data: The New Oil Or Fools’ Gold?

There are some amazing data mining discoveries based on the leverage of Big Data; UPS used predictive analysis by monitoring and replacing specific parts they had saved on repair costs (FieldLogix, 2014). Deadly manhole explosions were predicted in New York (Ehrenberg, 2010). Walmart discovered that just before a hurricane, people in America bought an unusually large number of pop tarts (Hays, 2004). Data usually serves a purpose to prove or disprove hypotheses and theories, and excellent example of which is an investigation into the relationship between mobile phone usage and brain tumours (Frei et al, 2011). The Danish cell phone operators and health care service worked together to provide the data for a study into the relationship between brain tumours and cancer. The results showed no direct correlation. The benefits of adopting Big Data are as follows. First, the process of selecting data or population sampling is not required, as researchers can just take it ‘all’ and being persuaded to ignore data validity issues based on the ‘general trend’ provided by such a vast dataset. Second, Big Data processing can highlight the part of the datasets which reflects the core part of the problem. For example, medical data analysis can find the direct correlation between the lifestyle and genetic history with breast cancer.