Briefs

New York Times, By WILLIAM J. HOLSTEIN, October 9, 2005

DATA mining is becoming more sophisticated in government, politics and many industries, says Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer of the Teradata division of the NCR Corporation and an expert on data-mining techniques. Here are excerpts from an interview.

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Q. How does the Internal Revenue Service use data mining?

A. Are people paying the taxes that they're supposed to be paying? It turns out that random audits are a very ineffective way to get tax compliance. You need some random audits to find people cheating in new ways. But most noncompliance consists of patterns that have existed for a long time. You can apply these data-mining algorithms to understand the characteristics of a tax return where all the proper information is not provided or is submitted incorrectly.

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