Preface to data mining in biomedical informatics and healthcare

In the last decade, healthcare institutions, pharmaceutical companies as well as other organizations started to aggregate biomedical and clinical data in electronic databases. Mining these databases gives promising new threads of knowledge that could lead to a variety of beneficial outcomes for the entire community, from improving patients’ quality of life towards saving public healthcare costs or increasing efficiency of private healthcare companies. Given the complexity of biomedical and clinical information, it is important to make use of the proper tools to gain valuable insights from the available data.