IEEE Spectrum has an interview with Michael Jordan that touches on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts. He is worried about the white noise or false positives. If a dataset is big enough you can always find something to correlate with what you want. That doesn’t mean it is causal or informatively correlated. He predicts a “big-data winter” after the bubble of excitement pops.
After a bubble, when people invested and a lot of companies overpromised without providing serious analysis, it will bust. And soon, in a two- to five-year span, people will say, “The whole big-data thing came and went. It died. It was wrong.” I am predicting that.