The interdisciplinary study and investigation of big data (extremely large data sets), involving theory and methods from mathematics, statistics, computer science, and machine learning, in particular where classical techniques are not able to deal with the extreme size of the data sets. Large data sets have become increasingly prevalent and important in the information age, for example in the social sciences, behavioural sciences, genomics, complex scientific experiements, and via the Internet. See E-science, topological data analysis.