Donald Snyder Quotes

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

I love data. I think it's very important to get it right, and I think it's good to question it.

Every company has messy data, and even the best of AI companies are not fully satisfied with their data. If you have data, it is probably a good idea to get an AI team to have a look at it and give feedback. This can develop into a positive feedback loop for both the IT and AI teams in any company.

Every day we have teams looking for new data sets.

The bigger a data set that you have, the more polls, the more surveys that you have that people undertake, the more accurate your models are going to be. That's just a fact of data science.

Companies that rely on licensing a proprietary dataset should expect to be outpaced by competitors using modern data collection techniques and more frequent updates and greater accuracy.

Data is cost. It takes money to create data, store it, clean it, and throw resources at it to learn anything from it.

Big data sets are never complete.

The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it. People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

There is a reasonable concern that posting raw data can be misleading for those who are not trained in its use and who do not have the broader perspective within which to place a particular piece of data that is raw.

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

With data collection, 'The sooner the better' is always the best answer.

There's something that happens with the collection of a large amount of data when it's dumped into an Excel spreadsheet or put into a pie chart. You run the risk of completely missing what it's about.

I have more information in one place than anybody in the world.

Go out and collect data and, instead of having the answer, just look at the data and see if the data tells you anything. When we're allowed to do this with companies, it's almost magical.

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

People are saying, 'Big Data is the new oil.'

Whenever you can, count.

It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

Data not only measures progress—it inspires it. Once you start measuring problems, people are more inclined to take action to fix them, because nobody wants to end up at the bottom of a list of rankings.

Collect it all!