ABSTRACT
There are a number of circumstances when there will not be an existing modeling framework and mathematical representations of the system under study. For example, one may be working with a new material whose responses to different stresses are unknown. In such a case, there may be experimental data that describe the relationships between the state of the material and the stresses applied. Scientists who are exploring the relationships between genetics and disease mine those data to define and test models of those relationships. In a similar way, data on the economy are used to derive models of market behavior under a variety of circumstances.
