Data mining and inorganic crystallography

Inorganic crystallography is a data intensive field of science. Much of the work in this vast field is focused on ways to acquire, model, organize and manage that data. To a lesser extent, there are efforts to survey that information from which one hopes to glean patterns of behavior that would offer insight into the complex chemical and geometrical relationships governing the existence or stability of a given compound. In this article we provide an overview of the types of information that can be gleaned by applying data mining and statistical learning techniques to inorganic crystallography. The focus of the paper is in two broad areas, classification and prediction of data, and the two primary roles of data mining as a field.