Everything big data claims to know about you could be wrong

Description

When it comes to understanding what makes people tick — and get sick — medical science has long assumed that the bigger the sample of human subjects, the better. But new research by UC Berkeley, Drexel University and the University of Groningen suggests this big-data approach may be wildly off the mark. That’s largely because emotions, behavior and physiology vary markedly from one person to the next and one moment to the next. So averaging out data collected from a large group of human subjects at a given instant offers only a snapshot, and a fuzzy one at that, researchers said.