Virtual Gold also announced the availability of a report on the experience of using CarMiner to study the Ford Explorer. The report addresses questions of current interest pertaining to tire-related, rollover-related, driver-maneuver-related, and in-car-death-related fatal crashes involving Ford Explorer and other comparable sport utility vehicle (SUV) during the period 1995-1999. By examining the relationships that exist among 120 vehicle-related and driver-related attributes in the FARS data of over 10,000 fatal crashes, the FARS statistics highlighted automatically by CarMiner provide insight over and beyond what appears to be presently known about these questions. They can serve to provide early warnings of potential safety issues that should be addressed.
Virtual Gold estimated that there could be as many as 344 trillion partial relationships among the 120 attributes in the FARS data on SUV's, suggesting why it was all but inevitable that CarMiner would discover knowledge to shed light on these questions about Ford Explorer. CarMiner processes this data efficiently on a standard personal computer, which is suggestive of the power of causative analysis. The report introduces the concepts that underlie causative analysis and is written for a wide, non-technical audience. The company also plans to conduct analyses on other models of SUVs, cars and trucks in the near future.
Dr. Bhandari, Virtual Gold's Founder and CEO, was prompted to apply the company's award winning data mining technology to the FARS database after reading an article in the New York Times. The article noted that "examining the (FARS) data without a clear idea of what it contains is much harder than finding clues once a problem is known," explaining the challenge faced by Ford, Firestone and federal safety regulators in identifying such problems before they are known.