Data Science and Its Applications to Social Research

Big Data provide opportunities to study complex social systems, by the empirical observation of large-scale data of various types (numeric, ordinal, and nominal variables, symbolic data, texts, images, data streams, multi-way data, social networks, etc.). The Web pervasive use in daily life is having an impressive effect on data production and consumption. IoT, Big Data, social networks are generating a data deluge able to change radically individual and social behaviors. We are facing a data revolution that is transforming the routines of production of data, once consolidated within the different disciplines. These changes are having important consequences such as the re-emergence of “data-driven” science, which is opposed to "hypotheses-driven" science. The availability of big data is facilitating the adoption of the “data first” model of science affirming that exploring existing data may be more useful than building models of why people behave the way they do. The social data revolution enables not only new business models, but also provides better instruments to support policy maker decisions.