What is Spurious Correlation

Big data brings new opportunities to modern society and challenges to data scientists. On one hand, big data holds great promises for discovering subtle population patterns and heterogeneities that are not possible with small-scale data. On the other hand, the massive sample size and high dimensionality of big data introduce unique computational and statistical challenges, including scalability and storage bottleneck, noise accumulation, spurious correlation, incidental endogeneity, and measurement errors. These challenges are distinguished and require new computational and statistical paradigm. Prior to data analysis, data must be well constructed. However, considering the variety of datasets in big data, the efficient representation, access, and analysis of unstructured or semi-structured data are still challenging. Understanding the method by which data can be preprocessed is important to improve data quality and the analysis results. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the big data challenges and also provide a brief description of each challenge.