Big Data For Development: Applications and Techniques

TL;DR

This paper reviews how big data analytics can be applied to human development, highlighting its potential benefits in healthcare, education, and poverty alleviation, while also discussing key challenges such as privacy and data quality.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of existing big data for development (BD4D) applications, emphasizing both opportunities and challenges in leveraging big data for societal progress.

Findings

Big data analytics can significantly impact healthcare, education, and poverty reduction.

Challenges include data privacy, acquisition, sharing, and ensuring data veracity.

Open issues involve handling data diversity and establishing context for analysis.

Abstract

With the explosion of social media sites and proliferation of digital computing devices and Internet access, massive amounts of public data is being generated on a daily basis. Efficient techniques/ algorithms to analyze this massive amount of data can provide near real-time information about emerging trends and provide early warning in case of an imminent emergency (such as the outbreak of a viral disease). In addition, careful mining of these data can reveal many useful indicators of socioeconomic and political events, which can help in establishing effective public policies. The focus of this study is to review the application of big data analytics for the purpose of human development. The emerging ability to use big data techniques for development (BD4D) promises to revolutionalize healthcare, education, and agriculture; facilitate the alleviation of poverty; and help to deal with humanitarian crises and violent conflicts. Besides all the benefits, the large-scale deployment of BD4D is beset with several challenges due to the massive size, fast-changing and diverse nature of big data. The most pressing concerns relate to efficient data acquisition and sharing, establishing of context (e.g., geolocation and time) and veracity of a dataset, and ensuring appropriate privacy. In this study, we provide a review of existing BD4D work to study the impact of big data on the development of society. In addition to reviewing the important works, we also highlight important challenges and open issues.