“The millions of voices reflected in books tell a long and fascinating story about our culture and our history. But not everyone’s voice is recorded on our bookshelves. And sometimes the silence of the missing voices can drown out everything else.“
[Uncharted, Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michael]
The movie “Hidden Figures” shows that our history has not included hidden figures or unsung heroes correctly. This intentional (or sometimes inadvertent) omission provides only partial knowledge about our world, leading to a misconception or bias about the world.
Data scientists should consider this sparsity structure of data, called “unknown unknowns” to understand the whole picture of data effectively. For example, we could not clearly understand spatiotemporal human behaviors in the city with data from smartphones because the person who doesn’t have a smartphone are excluded in this data.
Everybody makes DATA 