24 Mining Your Own Business in Telecoms Using DB2 Intelligent Miner for Data
3.1 What is data mining?
Data mining is treated by many people as more of a philosophy, or a subgroup of
mathematics, rather than a practical solution to business problems. You can see
this by the variety of definitions that are used, for example:
“Data mining is the exploration and analysis of very large data with
automatically or semi-automatically procedures for previously unknown,
interesting, and comprehensible dependencies”
Or
“Data mining is the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and
potentially useful information from data.”
While these definitions have their place, in this book we want to concentrate on
the practical issues of data mining ...