Big Data backlash

I predicted that there would be an eventual push back on Big Data and it seems that it has begun. Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis of NYU had an op-ed in the Times yesterday outlining nine issues with Big Data. I think one way to encapsulate many of the critiques is that you will never be able to do true prior free data modeling. The number of combinations in a data set grows as the factorial of the number of elements, which grows faster than an exponential. Hence, Moore’s law can never catch up. At some point, someone will need to exercise some judgement in which case Big Data is not really different from the ordinary data that we deal with all the time.