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Analyzing Big Data Has Been Integrated Into Society

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Checking out at your local Target or Walmart have you ever thought of how much the store could know about you just based on what you buy? You picked up dog food last week so they know you have a pet, and you bought school supplies today letting them know you 're a student. Now imagine this store compiling the data of what all of their customers buy and correlating it with personal information gleaned from rewards cards or surveys. After amassing these large amounts of data, companies can become masterminds in predictive analytics. According to Naked Statistics, Target can even predict when someone is pregnant based upon what they buy in the previous months (CITE). This collecting of large amounts of data and use of said data to find …show more content…

With big data seeming to boom so fast, it 's not surprising that problems in the processing of these enormous data sets were overlooked. With something so popular still in the experimental phase, there is a multitude of troubles that arise from the lack of rules or guides to limit how researchers manipulate the data in order to pull out the correlations that many big data scientists discover. There have been many worries with big data, but they all fall under 2 main issues. The first of which is the data itself. When trying to amass the absurd amounts of data, the quality can sometimes be overlooked for the quantity. Wilson exemplifies this by discussing data collected through social media. The web seems like an easy way to discover what people like while simultaneously correlating that with demographics, however, not all of that data has been vetted. Not everyone online is a real person and not everything people post online is true. The data just isn 't reliable. (CITE) With Wilson pointing out this shortcoming in the use of social media data it is clear to see how easy it may be for a researcher to overlook possible problems with the data’s reliability and analyze false information that could eventually lead to false conclusions. In his book

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