What is Data Mining?
Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining software is one of analytical tools for analyzing data. It allows users to analyze data from many different dimensions or angles, categorize it, and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding relationships/correlations or patterns among many of fields in large relational databases.
Key Terms in Data Mining:-
Data:
Data are any facts, numbers, or text that can be processed by a computer. Today, organizations are accumulating vast and growing amounts of data in different formats and different databases.
Information:
The relationships or correlation among all the data can provide information. For example, analysis of sale transaction data can give information on which products are more selling and on which occasion/time.
Knowledge:
Information can be converted into knowledge using historical patterns and future trends. For example, summary information on supermarket sales can be analyzed for promotional efforts to provide knowledge to consumer buying behaviour.
Data mining consists of five major elements:
Extract, transform, and load transaction data onto the data warehouse system.
Store and manage the data in a multidimensional database system.
Provide data access to business analysts and information technology professionals.
Analyze the data by application software.
Present the data in a useful format, such as a graph or table.
