Materials Science and Engineering: Chapter 2. Data Mining in Materials Science and Engineering

Data mining is the process of uncovering patterns, associations, anomalies, and statistically significant structures and events in data. It borrows and builds on ideas from many disciplines, ranging from statistics to machine learning, mathematical optimization, and signal and image processing. Data mining techniques are becoming an integral part of scientific endeavors in many application domains, including astronomy, bioinformatics, chemistry, materials science, climate, fusion, and combustion. In this chapter, we provide a brief introduction to the data mining process and some of the algorithms used in extracting information from scientific data sets.