Final answer:
Firms use Data Mining to analyze large volumes of data in databases, utilizing artificial intelligence and statistical tools to extract useful information and discover hidden patterns.
Step-by-step explanation:
To discover insights hidden in the volumes of data in their databases, firms use Data Mining, which consists of artificial intelligence and statistical tools. Data mining is essentially the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. This process allows businesses to sift through layers of seemingly unrelated data to discover hidden patterns and establish relationships that can help in decision-making. The raw data that scientists gather in their investigations must be analyzed and interpreted, generally using statistics, before they can provide supporting evidence for a hypothesis.
With the exponential growth of data, data mining has become a more significant approach in testing hypotheses. By applying computer algorithms and statistical analysis, data research or in silico research provides new methods for data analysis and interpretation, which is especially valuable in fields combining biology and computer science.
When examining data to find trends, using analytical intelligence is crucial. This analytical approach is part of what sociology students might engage with when they learn to apply statistics to analyze data. In statistics, organizing and summarizing data is known as descriptive statistics, and methods to draw conclusions from data are known as inferential statistics, a key component in scientific research and business analysis alike.