All of the data in the world and the amount is growing at a frightening rate won’t help researchers solve the big problems if they can t make sense of it. Which is why a team of researchers from Harvard University and the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. has developed analytical data-mining software that can find an oasis of meaning in a desert of numbers. They ve used the software to find insights on the socioeconomic impact of obesity, bacteria in the gut and baseball.
The software teases out relationships among data points (potentially millions of them) and measures the strength of these connections. As the researchers report in a paper appearing in the December 16 issue of the journal Science , most data-mining tools used today can either find correlations between data or determine how solid those connections are few can do both.
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