It has been receiving growing attention of researches from many disciplines including
natural sciences, life sciences, engineering and even art & humanities.
It also leads to new research paradigms and ways of thinking on the path of development.
Lots of developed and under-developing tools improve our ability to make more felicitous decisions
than what we have made ever before. This paper presents an overview on Big Data including
four issues, namely: (i) concepts, characteristics and processing paradigms of Big Data;
(ii) the state-of-the-art techniques for decision making in Big Data; (iii) felicitous decision
making applications of Big Data in social science; and (iv) the current challenges of Big
Data as well as possible future directions.