1.1 Why Data Mining?

Necessity, who is the mother of invention. – Plato

We live in a world where vast amounts of data are collected daily. Analyzing such data is an important need. Section 1.1.1 looks at how data mining can meet this need by providing tools to discover knowledge from data. In Section 1.1.2, we observe how data mining can be viewed as a result of the natural evolution of information technology.

1.1.1 Moving toward the Information Age

We are living in the information age” is a popular saying; however, we are actually living in the data age. Terabytes or petabytes1 of data pour into our computer networks, the World Wide Web (WWW), and various data storage devices every day from business, society, science and engineering, medicine, ...

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