think computers are smarter than us.” A plethora of patterns are inevitable in large data sets and computer algorithms have no effective way of assessing whether data-mined patterns are truly useful or just meaningless coincidences. While data mining sometimes discovers useful relationships, Smith argues that the data deluge has caused the number of possible patterns that can be discovered relative to the number that are genuinely useful to grow exponentially—which makes it increasingly unlikely that discovered patterns are useful. This is the Paradox of Big Data: data mining is most seductive when there are a large number of variables to analyze, but the inevitable coincidental patterns in large data sets make it more likely that the statistical relationships discovered by data mining are spurious. Publications Selected books Smith, Gary, and Smith, Margaret. (2008). Houseonomics, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey:Pearson/Financial Times. Smith, Gary. (2015). Essential Statistics, Regression, and Econometrics, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Academic Press, second edition. Smith, Gary. (2014). Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics, New York: Overlook, London: Duckworth. China: Ginkgo. Smith, Gary. (2016). What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Luck in Our Everyday Lives, New York: Overlook, London: Duckworth, China: Shanghai Soothe Cultural Media Co. Smith, Gary. (2017). Money Machine: The Surprising Simple Power of Value Investing, New York: AMACOM, Smith, Gary. (2018). The AI Delusion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Smith, Gary, and Cordes, Jay (2019), The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science, (Winner of the 2020 Prose Award for Popular Science and Popular Mathematics), Oxford: Oxford University Press, Smith, Gary, and Cordes, Jay (2020), The Phantom Pattern Problem: The Mirage of Big Data, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Highly cited papers Smith, Margaret Hwang, Smith, Gary. (2006). “Bubble, Bubble, Where’s the Housing Bubble?,” presented at the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, March 30–31, 2006; subsequently published in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2006 (1), 1-67. Smith, Gary. (1998). “Learning Statistics by Doing Statistics,” Journal of Statistics Education, 6 (3), www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v6n3/smith.html. Backus, David, Brainard, William C, Smith, Gary, Tobin, James. (1980). “A Model of U.S. Financial and Nonfinancial Economic Behavior,” Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, 12 (2), 259-293. Smith, Gary, Campbell, Frank. (1980). “A Critique of Some Ridge Regression Methods,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, with discussion and rejoinder, 75 (369), 74-81. (Journal of the American Statistical Association invited Theory and Methods Paper for the 1979 meetings of the American Statistical