**3.2 Data mining techniques for drug metabolite identification**

Data interpretation is also an important step in drug metabolite identification and is a time-consuming process. Data mining techniques have been used to reduce the time required for data interpretation and to simplify the process of metabolite identification. Data mining involves software assisted post-acquisition data processing of the acquired data to obtain more accurate and rapid results. Different data mining techniques used for metabolite identification are extracted ion chromatogram, mass defect filter, product ion filter, neutral loss filter, isotope pattern filter, background subtraction, and control sample comparison [90].
