

Big data: are we making a big mistake? - feelthepain
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/21a6e7d8-b479-11e3-a09a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2xH3TZgd9

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api
I think there are two things here.

First is the suspect notion that mere statistics can supplant understanding.
It sort of boils down to "with enough data, correlation now equals causation."

But the second I think is AI.

I'm not sure all these systems are truly theory-free. What they are is AI
creating its own body of "theory" within its own quite alien "mind." There is
understanding here.

I'm not sure how to distinguish the two except to ask whether the data
analysis system in question is merely correlating or whether it has induced a
model -- a Bayesian model, a trained neural network, any number of other sorts
of computer models that can be induced from training data.

