Is big data the future of psychiatry?

Abstract

Big Data is a term that describes large volumes of high velocity, complex, and variable data that require advanced techniques and technologies to enable the capture, storage, distribution, management, and analysis of information. Big data analytics are a growing field in healthcare, offering probabilistic answers or statistical correlations to specific phenomena which, in turn, could be used to assist in decision-making at an epidemiological, clinical, diagnostic, or therapeutic level. Psychiatry itself also can take advantage of big data by applying its analytics into early detection of mental disorders, in the definition of therapeutic response criteria, for the classification of mental disorders. The aim of this review is to present the theoretical background that define big data, its potential use in psychiatry, and to discuss about the conflicting suggestion of big data as a new epistemology. In conclusion, big data offers an alternative approach to scientific knowledge by answering psychiatric issues and problems from a different perspective, based on statistical and computational algorithms.