A new breed of miners — data miners — is having its annual convention in Anchorage this week. The KDD Conference brings together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data.
Attending are dozens of computer scientists from around the world, representing both academic and commercial interests in the field of data science.
Data mining is the practice of examining large databases in order to generate and categorize new information, patterns, anomalies, and correlations that can be used to drive messages or predict outcomes. It’s used widely in the political field, but this conference has no apparent link to campaigns or politics.