In research communities (for example, earth sciences, astronomy, business, and government), subsetting is the process of retrieving just the parts (a subset) of large files which are of interest for a specific purpose.
This occurs usually in a client—server setting, where the extraction of the parts of interest occurs on the server before the data is sent to the client over a network.
The main purpose of subsetting is to save bandwidth on the network and storage space on the client computer.
There are many different types of subsetting that can provide challenges with using software programs though.
[1] This statistics-related article is a stub.