Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications

20.4. Data Mining

Data mining may be defined as the process of extracting valid, previously unknown, comprehensible and actionable information from large databases and using it to make crucial business decisions. It is a tool that allows end-users direct access and manipulation of data from within data warehousing environment without the intervention of customised programming activity. In other words, data mining helps end users extract useful business information from large databases. Data mining is related to the subarea of statistics called exploratory data analysis and subarea of artificial intelligence called knowledge discovery and machine learning.

Data mining has a collection of techniques that aim to find useful but undiscovered patterns ...