ABSTRACT

In recent years, both the popular press and the scientific community have been focused on the potential of Big Data. The phrase has been used to refer to the very large amounts of data that are now being routinely collected by e-commerce sites, molecular biologists, sociologists, credit card companies, astrophysicists, and more. As computing becomes less expensive (and, in some cases, as experimental technologies make it possible to measure a growing number of features), the scale of data being collected across a broad range of fields will continue to increase at a rapid clip.