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Tool Detects Patterns Hidden in Vast Data Sets


Researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard University have developed a tool that can tackle large data sets in a way that no other software program can. Part of a suite of statistical tools called MINE, it can tease out multiple patterns hidden in health information from around the globe, statistics amassed from a season of major league baseball, data on the changing bacterial landscape of the gut, and much more.


The researchers report their findings in a paper appearing in the December 16 issue of the journal Science.


From Facebook to physics to the global economy, the world is filled with data sets that could take a person hundreds of years to analyze by eye. Sophisticated computer programs can search these data sets with great speed, but fall short when researchers attempt to even-handedly detect different kinds of patterns in large data collections.


"There are massive data sets that we want to explore, and within them, there may be many relationships that we want to understand," said Broad Institute associate member Pardis Sabeti, senior author of the paper and an assistant professor at the Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University. "The human eye is the best way to find these relationships, but these data sets are so vast that we can't do that. This toolkit gives us a way of mining the data to look for relationships."


Lees verder: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/...11215141611.htm


Bron: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard ( http://www.broadinstitute.org/news/3784 )