Veracity Roadmap: Is Big Data Objective, Truthful and Credible?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that big data can possess different characteristics, which affect its quality. Depending on its origin, data processing technologies, and methodologies used for data collection and scientific discoveries, big data can have biases, ambiguities, and inaccuracies which need to be identified and accounted for to reduce inference errors and improve the accuracy of generated insights. Big data veracity is now being recognized as a necessary property for its utilization, complementing the three previously established quality dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity), But there has been little discussion of the concept of veracity thus far. This paper provides a roadmap for theoretical and empirical definitions of veracity along with its practical implications. We explore veracity across three main dimensions: 1) objectivity/subjectivity, 2) truthfulness/deception, 3) credibility/implausibility – and propose to operationalize each of these dimensions with either existing computational tools or potential ones, relevant particularly to textual data analytics. We combine the measures of veracity dimensions into one composite index – the big data veracity index. This newly developed veracity index provides a useful way of assessing systematic variations in big data quality across datasets with textual information. The paper contributes to the big data research by categorizing the range of existing tools to measure the suggested dimensions, and to Library and Information Science (LIS) by proposing to account for heterogeneity of diverse big data, and to identify information quality dimensions important for each big data type.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.046 | 0.257 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.030 | 0.050 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".