Small Data Is Not New
According to Bryan Philips Cupertino, Calif.-based In Motion head of marketing, small data is the opposite of big data. It is a term that describes data sets with fewer than 1,000 rows or columns. The term was coined in 2011 by researchers at IBM to describe datasets that are too small for traditional statistical methods. In contrast to big data, small datasets can be analyzed using estimation. Examples of small datasets include customer transactions, social media posts, and individual genome sequences.