Emotion and big data: the elephant in the room?

Humans are emotional beings that reason, not reasoning beings that occasionally experience emotions. In fact, emotions are essential to good decision making. In the world of big data and machine learning, the human potential for emotions can influence the way machine learning systems are developed and deployed, and also influence the way they are perceived and used. The two manifestations of emotion that can influence decision making are bias and noise, both of which have emotional undertones. In this chapter, I consider the impact of emotion, bias and noise and suggest a way to acknowledge and measure their impact in the realm of machine learning and big data.