Big data in autism research: Methodological challenges and solutions

While the concept of big data has emerged over the past decade as a hot topic in nearly all areas of scientific inquiry, it has rarely been discussed in the context of autism research. In this commentary we describe aspects of big data that are relevant to autism research and methodological issues such as confounding and data error that can hamper scientific investigation. Although big data studies can have transformative impact, bigger is not always better, and big data require the same methodological considerations and interdisciplinary collaboration as "small data" to extract useful scientific insight.