Here’s a fascinating piece from Scientific American by Larry Greenemeier.  It concerns data-mining software developed by Harvard University and the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard.  The software in question is a component of the Maximal Information-based Nonparametric Exploration (MINE) program.

“The software teases out relationships among data points (potentially millions of them) and measures the strength of these connections. As the researchers report in a paper appearing in the December 16 issue of the journal Science, most data-mining tools used today can either find correlations between data or determine how solid those connections are—few can do both.” [Link in original]

Greenemeier summarizes the results of the program’s initial runs on World Health Organization and Major League Baseball data.  Check it out.