Why is it in news?

Researchers showed that socioeconomic attributes such as income, education, and voting patterns can be inferred from cars.

• Combining publicly available data from Google Street View with machine-learning methods, researchers have found a way to predict the voting behaviour of people in the US
• If the number of sedans in a city is higher than the number of pickup trucks, that city is likely to vote for a Democrat in the next presidential election (88 per cent chance). Otherwise, the city is likely to vote for a Republican (82 per cent chance), showed the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• Using machine learning, an approach to artificial intelligence (AI) in which computers “learn”, the researchers developed a model that showed that socioeconomic attributes such as income, education, and voting patterns can be inferred from cars detected in Google Street View images.
• the researchers presented a method that estimates socioeconomic characteristics of regions spanning 200 US cities by using 50 million images of street scenes gathered with Google Street View cars.
• In order to get their AI algorithms to classify cars accurately, the researchers trained it by recruiting hundreds of people to identify vehicles in a sample of millions of pictures
• The researchers determined the make, model and year of all motor vehicles encountered in particular neighbourhoods.
• Data from this census of motor vehicles, which enumerated 22 million automobiles in total (eight per cent of all automobiles in the US), were used to accurately estimate income, race, education, and voting patterns.
• The results showed that the number of sedans and pickup trucks encountered during a drive through a city could reveal how the city would vote in the next presidential election.
• To confirm the accuracy of their voter preference estimates, the researchers compared them with the voting results of the 2008 presidential election.

What is Big Data Analytics?

• Big data is data sets that are so voluminous and complex that traditional data processing application software are inadequate to deal with them.
• Big data challenges include capturing data, data storage, data analysis, search, sharing, transfer, visualization, querying, updating and information privacy.
• There are three dimensions to big data known as Volume, Variety and Velocity.
• Lately, the term "big data" tends to refer to the use of predictive analytics, user behavior analytics, or certain other advanced data analytics methods that extract value from data, and seldom to a particular size of data set.
• Analysis of data sets can find new correlations to spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the intelligence displayed by machines and artificially created systems. This term is used when a machine mimics cognitive functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as learning and problem solving.

Conclusion

• Usage of Big Data analytics and AI can greatly help not only in gathering voter data, but can also help gather data on various behavioural aspects of the general population, which can help governments to provide good governance and provide targeted services in order to help serve the people better.