Machine learning and data mining

Over the past decade, many organizations have begun to routinely cap-ture huge volumes of historical data describing their operations, products, and customers. At the same time, scientists and engineers in many fields have been captur-ing increasingly complex experimental data sets, such as gigabytes of functional mag-netic resonance imaging (MRI) data describing brain activity in humans. The field of data mining addresses the question of how best to use this historical data to discover general regularities and improve the process of making decisions.