Databases Illuminated, 4th Edition

15.11 Data Mining

Data mining is part of a larger process called knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). KDD steps include data cleaning, data integration, data selection, data transformation, data mining, pattern evaluation, and knowledge representation. Data mining means discovering new information from very large data sets. One of the techniques used in data mining is ML, a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that involves development of applications that learn from data and improve their performance over time. Because databases can contain confidential information, the use of data mining can raise issues of privacy and ethical use of data (discussed in more detail in Chapter 16).

Data mining was developed in the 1990s to allow more sophisticated ...