Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

1.4 What Kinds of Patterns Can Be Mined?

We have observed various types of data and information repositories on which data mining can be performed. Let us now examine the kinds of patterns that can be mined.

There are a number of data mining functionalities. These include characterization and discrimination (Section 1.4.1); the mining of frequent patterns, associations, and correlations (Section 1.4.2); classification and regression (Section 1.4.3); clustering analysis (Section 1.4.4); and outlier analysis (Section 1.4.5). Data mining functionalities are used to specify the kinds of patterns to be found in data mining tasks. In general, such tasks can be classified into two categories: descriptive and predictive. Descriptive mining tasks characterize ...