I'm a prospective PhD (CS) student. I've worked in the area of Anomaly Detection during my MS Research. Now, I've got two major and recently emerging areas to choose, i.e., Deep Neural Networks and Big Data Analytics. However, I've to chose one as my future area to work on.
I want to relate one of these fields to my previous work that was about Anomaly Detection. Moreover, I've to ask two questions here:
The question is hard to answer, because
(1) Deep Neural Networks may be/become a feasible tool in Big Data Analytics, of which anomaly detection -AFAIK- is a part.
(2) Both, big data and NN will have their scope in the future.
in the end it's a question of taste. From my limited understanding, Big Data Analytics would be the broader subject, as it might comprise NN. On the other side NN is as subject, whose relevance goes far beyond Big Data Analytics, as it is the core technology to all kind of contemporary and future AI (artificial intelligence).
By the way there are different kind of NN models and approaches. Assert you will learn about all of them. Multi layered feed forward (the classic ones), Hopfield networks, Kohonen networks and so on ...
From my very personal view I would decide for neural networks, but you should not let yourself influence by that.