What to Expect in Data Mining: Trends and Forecast

The current data mining trends give evidence that this year is going to be bright for data science. Data is now changing almost every sphere of our life and industry. If you are an investor, CEO of a large company or a technology savvy startupper, you should have your finger on the pulse and be aware of what is happening in the data sector.

Data Mining and Social Media

The number of social media and mobile apps users is increasing and this suggests that 2016 is going to be brilliant for the companies in this field.

There are a lot of pros for using social media and mobile applications as they are easy to use and everyone can afford them. But at the same time, a big disadvantage is hidden where many users do not expect to encounter it.

Almost all free social media platforms and applications collect users’ data and provide advertisers with them. It means that those platforms and apps raise their revenues through selling users’ data for online advertising.

This approach is very common and the fact of collecting data to make money with ads is widely known. However, a lot of consumers use their favorite apps and social networks without any second thought and are very often not aware that they automatically allow collecting their data. And this is not always as harmless as it may seem at first sight.

According to the research conducted at Harvard University, 73 percent of the most popular Android apps collect their users’ information and share it with some third parties. The shared data include names and email addresses. At the same time users were not notified and had no idea of such data collecting.

This is obviously the issue of both security and transparency. Users have no more control over their privacy. The current trend is that more and more consumers advocate for increasing transparency of data collecting. Some organizations like e. g. the U.S. based Data Transparency Lab aim to reveal the issue of collecting personal data and look for some ways to make data sharing more transparent.

Data Mining and Psychiatry

Collecting and analyzing personal information from social networks for marketing and advertising purposes is not the only way to apply data mining in this area. While using social media, people are ready to share even more than just their names and emails online.

Every day active social media users create numerous posts about their activities, plans and moods. On Facebook people react and show their emotions by clicking “like”, “wow”, “sad”, or “angry” options.

Based on this data, scientists can monitor mental state of the online communities.

A team of French and Canadian researchers creates groundbreaking algorithms to identify individuals with some warning signs of mental illnesses. According to the researchers, “the model will be used by psychologists and psychiatrists to identify variables related to major mental illness”.

Data Mining and Life Science

One more trend this year will be an increased demand for data mining in life sciences.

Each day people produce 2.5 million terabytes of data and this number is predicted to grow. Mining, combining and analyzing such a big amount of data will help researchers engaged in life sciences deal with complex chemical and biological data more efficiently.

Data mining techniques applied to obtain information from biological data have already reduced the cost of gene sequencing. According to some reports, today reading a human genome costs tens of thousands times less than fifteen years ago and it is going to become more and more affordable. And in the end it means that doctors will have more opportunities to successfully diagnose and treat their patients.