Data Mining

Artificial Intelligence comes in many guises, it is not only for robots and self-aware computers. One of the things it is used for is to search for patterns in huge reams of data. This is called Data Mining. In fact data is now considered very valuable and people who know how to mine data to find patterns and help clients improve their businesses are well sought after.

This is not just as simple as looking for a line of best fit among a few hundred data points. The data been dealt with in data mining can be on the order of billions of data points with many attributes living on a high dimensional plane. There are many known techniques for extracting useful knowledge from such a vast amount of information but many new techniques are still been researched today.

In short Data Mining is all about finding unsuspected relationships and sumarizing data in new ways to give insights to the owner (of the data) and allow them to understand it better. One problem is that the data is not always collected primarily for data mining (although it is more and more so these days) so there are sometimes some issues in transforming the data for use. Another is that it is key that a human can interpret the output so that it can be put to use.

In future posts I will detail a few major usages and users of Data Mining.

Thanks for reading.