Real-World Data Mining: Applied Business Analytics and Decision Making

4. Data and Methods in Data Mining

The popularity of data mining can be attributed to its ability to discover hidden patterns deep inside large data repositories that organizations are automatically accumulating these days. Data by itself is not valuable to organizations that are desperately looking for ways to make evidence-based intelligent decisions. It is only after methods are applied to data that the invaluable knowledge organizations need can be brought out. A large variety of methods and algorithms can be used to carry out different types of data mining tasks. Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages for a given project, depending on the specific characteristics of the problem being addressed and the data set being used. ...