Big Data’s ‘Streetlight Effect’: Where and How We Look Affects What We See

Government Technology: Big data offers us a window on the world. But large and easily available datasets may not show us the world we live in. For instance, epidemiological models of the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa using big data consistently overestimated the risk of the disease’s spread and underestimated the local initiatives that played a critical role in controlling the outbreak.

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