Challenges of Big Data Analyses and Applications in Psychology

The papers in this topical issue highlight the potential of applying machine learning techniques to big data in psychology. There are still many pressing issues in this field. For example, there is a need to succinctly summarize the current state of applications of big data in psychology. Also needed are more tutorial-style papers (e.g., Chen & Wojcik, 2016; Landers, Brusso, Cavanaugh, & Collmus, 2016)on how to acquire and analyze big data from popular sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Another important direction for future research is a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of conventional multivariate statistics and machine learning techniques for big data in psychology. We hope that the papers presented in this issue will stimulate more research in big data in psychology.