MIN_ers

[jya@pipeline.com (John Young)]

   New Sci 25 May 1996: 
 
   "Panning for data gold." 
 
      Nowadays nearly every organization from supermarkets to 
      the police can boast a vast mine of electronic data. 
      Separating the gold from the dross is the real 
      challenge. A growing band of computer scientists say 
      they can dig out nuggets of 24-carat knowledge from huge 
      mountains of database dross. They call themselves "data 
      miners", and they are wielding some pretty impressive 
      tools -- information theory, laws of probability,  
      neural networks, tree induction, genetic algoritms,  
      disjunctive normal form logic. 
       
      But the impact of their efforts is anything but esoteric. 
      By identifying potential new customers -- or ways of 
      hanging on to existing ones -- this information is worth 
      millions in extra revenue. And this is just the start, 
      according to Usama Fayyad of Microsoft Research and 
      co-editor of a new book on data mining. 
 
   MIN_ers