In his presidential address before the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) fall research conference in early November, Mathematica CEO Paul Decker explored the nexus between policymaking, public management, and evidence-based research.

In recent years we have seen an increase in the amount of statistics in society describing different phenomena based on so called Big Data. The term Big Data is used for a variety of data as explained in the report, many of them characterized not just by their large volume, but also by their...