Poll Results: What do you call analyzing data?

Data mining is still the most top term, but the 2nd most popular terms differ for Industry and Academia. The least common term is surprising. We also analyze the "bias" of each term with respect to usage in Industry.

The previous KDnuggets Poll asked:
What term do you currently prefer for describing the activity of analyzing data and finding useful patterns

The results are in the table below. We note that Data Mining is still most popular term among KDnuggets readers, followed by Predictive Analytics, with Data science the least popular. This suggests that "Data Science" term caught more among press than among people who actually do data analysis.

What term do you currently prefer for describing the activity of analyzing data and finding useful patterns: [172 votes]
Data Mining (94)	54.7%
Predictive Analytics (25)	14.5%
Statistics (15)	8.7%
Business Analytics (12)	7.0%
Knowledge Discovery (9)	5.2%
Business Intelligence (5)	2.9%
Data Science (4)	2.3%
Other (8)	2%

The respondents employer type was

Industry/Self-employed , 58.7%
Academia/Student , 32.6%
Government or Non-profit , 5.8%
Other , 2.9%

Next, we broke down most popular terms by employer type (putting all non-Industry voters into one, mainly academic, group). For each term, industry "Bias" is the ratio of industry/non-industry respondents who chose this term to the overall industry/non-industry ratio (1.42).

Thus we see that Predictive Analytics has an Industry Bias of 5.16 - it is used 5.16 times more frequently by the industry people than by non-industry ones.

We note that data mining is the most popular name among both industry and academia. However, 2nd most popular name in industry is Predictive Analytics, while in academia it is Statistics.

In the following table, the Academia and Industry columns width represent the bias towards the term in Academia/Industry respectively, and bar height represents the overall popularity of the term.

Term (Industry Bias)	Academia	Industry
Predictive Analytics (5.16)
Business Analytics (2.11)
Data Mining (0.87)
Statistics (0.26)
Knowledge Discovery (0.20)

Gregory PS

Historical note: Data analysis was called statistics in early 20th century.
The term "data mining" appeared around 1960s, used in a negative sense.
I coined the term "Knowledge Discovery in Data" for the first KDD workshop in 1989. However, the industry preferred "Data Mining", which remained the most popular term until about 2006, when it was overtaken by Analytics (propelled by creation of Google Analytics) and "Predictive Analytics".
The hot term of 2011 is "Data Science".
However, it is surprising that "Data Science" was used so little by KDnuggets readers who actually analyze the data.