The seven deadly sins of data mining - and how to avoid them

Summary form only given. Fifteen years ago, the salient features of the known extrasolar planets could be written down on an index card. At present the catalog of extrasolar planets numbers in the thousands, and the rate of detection is increasing rapidly. Highly diverse planets are being identified through a diverse set of observational techniques; photometric transit detection, Doppler radial velocimetry, gravitational microlensing, and direct detection via adaptive optics imaging are all producing discoveries at an increasing rate. In this talk, I will give an overview of the census as currently understood, and I will show how the different detection methods are producing complementary detections. Like many areas in astronomy, exoplanetary detection is facing issues related to “Big Data”. Large online repositories (such as that produced by the Kepler Mission) serve many terabytes of data, much of which has gone analyzed due to the time-consuming algorithms required. The talk will seek to highlight the current issues, and will show how ad-hoc collaborations across the community are being formed to deal with the challenges (and the excitement) of this fast-moving area.