“Their measurements of the performance of airfoils in a wind tunnel were a simplification, an imperfect simulacrum of the actual performance of an actual wing on an actual plane in actual flight. But they reasoned, data is better than no data.”
[Uncharted, Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michael]
A police sketch artist draws a brief sketch of the suspect based on one or more eyewitnesses’ memory of a face. Even though it is not complete information compared to a photograph or video, it is still helpful to find the suspect. Yes, data is better than no data.
In data science, we sometimes make a simple model to describe the behavior of data and predict its future behavior using this model. It is impossible to make a perfect prediction with a simple model but it still provides qualitatively reliable prediction, enabling us to sketchy knowledge about Big Data.
Everybody makes DATA 