The non-trivial extraction of implicit, earlier unknown and potentially useful information from data, specifically high-dimensional data, using pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and presentation of the information extracted in a form that is without difficulty understandable to humans. Significant biological discoveries are now frequently made by combining data mining methods with the traditional laboratory techniques; an instance is the discovery of novel regulatory areas for heat shock genes in C. Elegans made by mining vast amounts of the gene expression and sequence data for the significant patterns.