Big Data Analytics

I completely agree the author’s argument. It hits the blind spot of Big Data.

Marketers sometimes forget the Statistics 101 maxim that correlation doesn’t imply causation. I’m also sensing a movement in business to follow data blindly without common sense questioning.

As New Yorker’s Gary Marcus put it, “Big Data is a powerful tool for inferring correlations, not a magic wand for inferring causality.”

There’s an art to data science. Big Data does not necessarily lead to Big Insights. As marketers, we need to ask the right questions to collect the right data, and probe deeply on the implications that we find.

…, purely algorithmic extraction of rules from data is prone to creating spurious connections, such as false correlations. Today’s big data hype seems more concerned with indiscriminate hoarding than helping businesses make the right decisions.

Reference: Big Data Analytics