[chengtao]

Yes, and IMO, most of the time, the insight behind the data is far more important than the modeling algorithms to achieve high performance with few exceptions (say computer vision, NLP, etc which really requires A LOT OF data). Even in some large data set, take page rank as an example. The fundamental insight was the popularity of the site would be a great signal for ranking the search result, and random walk would be a great way to approximate the popularity. As a result, Google made a great success in search ranking.