Data Mining -1

We are talking data mining in our last post and we were talking background of data mining. We continue our talk on data mining in this post.


Data mining identifies trends within data that go beyond simple analysis. Through the use of sophisticated algorithms, non-statistician users have the opportunity to identify key attributes of business processes and target opportunities. However, abdicating control of this process from the statistician to the machine may result in false-positives or no useful results at all.


Although data mining is a relatively new term, the technology is not. For many years, businesses have used powerful computers to sift through volumes of data such as supermarket scanner data to produce market research reports (although reporting is not always considered to be data mining). Continuous innovations in computer processing power, disk storage, and statistical software are dramatically increasing the accuracy and usefulness of data analysis.


The term data mining is often used to apply to the two separate processes of knowledge discovery and prediction. Knowledge discovery provides explicit information that has a readable form and can be understood by a user.