what is data mining

what is data mining

1.A class of database applications that look for hidden patterns in a group of data that can be used to predict future behavior. For example, data mining software can help retail companies find customers with common interests. The term is commonly misused to describe software that presents data in new ways. True data mining software doesn't just change the presentation, but actually discovers previously unknown relationships among the data.

Data mining is popular in the science and mathematical fields but also is utilized increasingly by marketers trying to distill useful consumer data from Web sites.

2.Data mining (DM), also called Knowledge-Discovery in Databases (KDD) or Knowledge-Discovery and Data Mining, is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns such as association rules. It is a fairly recent topic in computer science but applies many older computational techniques from statistics, information retrieval, machine learning and pattern recognition.

3.search for hidden information: the locating of previously unknown patterns and relationships within data using a database application, e.g. the locating of customers with common interests in a retail establishment's database