“That’s where the final transformation comes in. How do you turn a few hundred thousand personality profiles into a few million? With a lot of computing power, and a massive matrix of possibilities. “Even though your sample size is 300,000 people, give or take, your feature set is like 100m across,” says Wylie. Every single Facebook “like” found in the data set becomes its own column in this enormous matrix. “Even if there is only one instance in the entire set, it’s still a feature.””
Cambridge Analytica: how did it turn clicks into votes?
Whistleblower Christopher Wylie explains the science behind Cambridge Analytica’s mission to transform surveys and Facebook data into a political messaging weapon