title: The challenges of big data.
abstract: The largely untapped potential of big data analytics is a feeding frenzy that has been fueled by the production of many next-generation-sequencing-based data sets that are seeking to answer long-held questions about the biology of human diseases. Although these approaches are likely to be a powerful means of revealing new biological insights, there are a number of substantial challenges that currently hamper efforts to harness the power of big data. This Editorial outlines several such challenges as a means of illustrating that the path to big data revelations is paved with perils that the scientific community must overcome to pursue this important quest.
authors.affiliation: McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO 63108, USA emardis@wustl.edu.
authors.forename: Elaine R
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5892-1553
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Mardis
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; D033181:Information Dissemination; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D013223:Statistics as Topic