Fake Data

My colleague Kaiser Fung talks fake data.  Good thoughts and pointers to examples and resources. Read his whole article at the link.

Here is a problem staring many digital/Web/social media analysts in the face today: what if you are told that the majority of the data you have been dutifully reporting, analyzing and (gasp!) modeling are fake data?

By fake data, I mean, useless numbers that have no bearing on reality: visits to websites that never happened, clicks on ads by hired hands, clicks on ads by bots, clicks on ads that are buried layers deep invisible to any humans, video "views" that result from automatically playing clips, video "views" that last one second, ad reach (i.e. number of people who have seen the ad) that exceeds Census counts, reviews planted by hired hands, etc. etc.  .... "