Improving Predictive Accuracy Using Smart-Data rather than Big-Data: A Case Study of Soccer Teams' Evolving Performance

In an era of big-data the general consensus is that relationships between variables of interest surface almost by themselves. Sufficient amounts of data can nowadays reveal new insights that would otherwise have remained unknown. Inferring knowledge from data, however, imposes further challenges. For example, the 2007-08 financial crisis revealed that big-data models used by investment banks and rating agencies for decision making failed to predict real-world financial risk. This is because while such big-data models are excellent at predicting past events, they may fail to predict similar future events that are influenced by new and hence, previously unseen factors.