The digital physics of data mining
Usama M. Fayyad · Communications of the ACM · 2001
This article focuses on the prospects of data mining, which is one of the central activities associated with understanding, navigating, and exploiting the new world of digital data. It is the mechanized process of identifying and discovering useful structure in data. The data is the most valuable asset in the emerging information economy. The person mastering techniques for exploiting and mining it and nimbly navigating the vast new high-dimensional frontiers will inevitably have power in the digital information environment and its related economies. While people have recorded and stored data for at least the past 5,000 years, data analysis is a fairly recent phenomenon in a number of scientific fields, initially astronomy and medicine. Data mining techniques will be used to filter, select, customize, and deliver the right doses of information in the right format and the right context. Human ability to harvest benefits from the vast data stores will rely entirely on algorithms and mathematics of data mining. Data mining will enable the ultimate transformation of the physical, through the digital to the mathematical instantiation.