How big is “big” when it comes to Big Data? When we get together and talk about such things, it sometimes feels like a competitive game among researchers. Much of my work is in functional neuroimaging, which involves (somewhat) large data sets—it depends on whom you ask!

Another popular area of research for statisticians is genetics or genomics data, which are also (very) large. Genetics data are probably, in general, larger than imaging data, because it is cheaper and easier to acquire genetics data compared to, say, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, so the former are more free to vary in one of the relevant dimensions (sample size) than the latter.

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