Mining What Others Miss

This article discusses data mining that draws upon extensive work in areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases, and high-performance computing to discover interesting and previously unknown information in data. More specifically, data mining is the analysis of 10 large data sets to find relationships and patterns that aren’t readily apparent, and to summarize the data in new and useful ways. Data mining technology has enabled earth scientists from NASA to discover changes in the global carbon cycle and climate system, and biologists to map and explore the human genome. Data mining is not restricted solely to vast banks of data with unlimited ways of analyzing it. Manufacturers, such as W.L. Gore (the maker of GoreTex) use commercially available data mining tools to warehouse and analyze their data, and improve their manufacturing process. Gore uses data mining tools from analytic software vendor SAS for statistical modeling in its manufacturing process.