The Lure of Statistics in Data Mining

The field of Data Mining like Statistics concerns itself with "learning from data" or "turning data into information". For statisticians the term "Data mining" has a pejorative meaning. Instead of finding useful patterns in large volumes of data as in the case of Statistics, data mining has the connotation of searching for data to fit preconceived ideas. Here we try to discuss the similarities and differences as well as the relationships between statisticians and data miners. This article is intended to bridge some of the gap between the people of these two communities.