ABSTRACT
This chapter presents several real-world examples showing the relevance of working with Big Data and a plea for the importance of Big Data when doing evaluations of (real-world) policies and programs. It reveals that there is a very strong association between changes in the sentiment of Dutch social media messages and consumer confidence. Google Correlate uses the same methodology and data as Google Flu Trends (GFTs), so the bankruptcy time series is uploaded into the Google Correlate spreadsheet. Early detection of flew activity can reduce the impact of both seasonal and pandemic influenza. A well-known example of this way of working is the GFTs, a tool that provides real-time estimates of flu incidence in several countries. The initial 2009 Google article stated that the GFTs predictions were ninety-seven percent accurate compared with data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
