Data Mining: Statistics and More?

Data mining is a new discipline lying at the interface of statistics, database technology, pattern recognition, machine learning, and other areas. It is concerned with the secondary analysis of large databases in order to find previously unsuspected relationships which are of interest or value to the database owners. New problems arise, partly as a consequence of the sheer size of the data sets involved, and partly because of issues of pattern matching. However, since statistics provides the intellectual glue underlying the effort, it is important for statisticians to become involved. There are very real opportunities for statisticians to make significant contributions.