Because New York is the country's largest?? provider of Medicaid services -- $44 billion worth in 2006 -- it is important for the state to control its costs, Acquario said. He also noted that the state must be prepared for any federal government move to increase its share of Medicaid costs. "The stakes are high for the state of New York," he said.

Wayne Eckerson, director of research at The Data Warehousing Institute, said that fraud detection is one of the biggest uses of data mining and predictive analytics tools.