Diversity in Big Data: A Review

Abstract

Big data technology offers unprecedented opportunities to society as a whole and also to its individual members. At the same time, this technology poses significant risks to those it overlooks. In this article, we give an overview of recent technical work on diversity, particularly in selection tasks, discuss connections between diversity and fairness, and identify promising directions for future work that will position diversity as an important component of a data-responsible society. We argue that diversity should come to the forefront of our discourse, for reasons that are both ethical - to mitigate the risks of exclusion - and utilitarian, to enable more powerful, accurate, and engaging data analysis and use.