Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

Isabella · Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 100

Data mining (DM), also called Knowledge-Discovery in Databases (KDD) or Knowledge-Discovery and Data Mining, is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns such as association rules. It is a fairly recent topic in computer science but applies many older computational techniques from statistics, information retrieval, machine learning and pattern recognition.

Notable uses of data mining

Data mining has been cited as the method by which the U.S. Army unit Able Danger supposedly had identified the 9/11 attack leader, Mohamed Atta, and three other 9/11 hijackers as possible members of an al Qaeda cell operating in the U.S. more than a year before the attack.

As is the case for economic models which successfully predict 10 of the last 3 recessions, one must of course know which other names came up on the "possible members" list before being confident this was not an exercise in data dredging.

It has been suggested that both the CIA and their Canadian counterparts, CSIS, have put this method of interpreting data to work for them as well, although they have not said how.