Data Mining in Bioinformatics

Abstract

One of the most central goals in Bioinformatics is the understanding of pattern and structures of biological data, while Data Mining is a discipline resulting from the combination of classical statistics and computer science algorithms, such as Machine Learning, whose aim is the extraction of new and useful knowledge from a large amount of data. This definition implicitly explain the reasons why, with the ever increasing amount of biological available data, product of the so called “omics” science, Data Mining has become a useful instrument in Bioinformatics. This article introduces Data Mining as core step of a process called Knowledge Discovery in Databases. The main steps of this process are presented along with the most important Data Mining and machine learning methodologies and tools, with regards to Bioinformatics environment.