Is there something like “old” and “new” statistics?
The blog post by Vincent Granville “Data science without statistics is possible, even desirable” starts talking about “old statistics” and “new statistics”, which started some more discussion about how statistics and data science relate.
Whereas I agree that there is something like “old” and “new” thinking of the role and the tools in statistics, I am less convinced that Data Science blesses us with many new techniques, which are generally more useful than what we use in statistics for quite a while.
Anyway, I promise, I won’t pester you with more big data related posts (at least this year) and want to close with my favorite quote regarding big data by George Dyson
“Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of making the decision to throw it away.”
Thus the “value” of this kind of data can be doubted, and it becomes quite clear, that most companies
- probably don’t have the need for big data solutions
- will struggle to find a decent business case for big data
