Exploring Big Data Analysis: Fundamental Scientific Problems

Although Big Data has been one of most popular topics since last several years, how to effectively conduct Big Data analysis is a big challenge for every field. This paper tries to address some fundamental scientific problems in Big Data analysis, such as opportunities, challenges, and difficulties encountered in the analysis. The challenges rise from multiple domains that include how Management Science influences data acquisition and data management, Information Science for data access and processing, Mathematics and Statistics for data understanding and Engineering for data applications. The paper outlines six open research problems on Big Data. It also reports some advances on current Big Data research, particularly in high-dimensional data and non-structured data processing. Finally, remarks on how to develop a Big Data algorithm are provided.