All about love and big data

Love means never having to say youre sorryaccording to Erich Segal in his novel Love Story which was popularised in the 1970 movie adaptation starring Ali McGraw and Ryan ONeal. With the advent of electronic databases, pathology laboratories the world over find themselves in possession of large amounts of data. It is tempting to think that mining these databases for their clinical/medical nuggets are going to be pleasant as being in love. In this column we will be urging a measured approach, because it is hardly ever true that big data means never having to do a variety of tasks before, during and after the data mining process itself.