Data mining

Generally, data mining (sometimes called data or knowledge discovery) is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining software is one of a number 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 correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases.

source : http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm


Data mining is a powerful new technology with great potential to help companies focus on the most important information in the data they have collected about the behavior of their customers and potential customers. It discovers information within the data that queries and reports can't effectively reveal. This paper explores many aspects of data mining in the following areas:

Data Rich, Information Poor

Data Warehouses

What is Data Mining?

What Can Data Mining Do?

The Evolution of Data Mining

How Data Mining Works

Data Mining Technologies

Real-World Examples

The Future of Data Mining

Privacy Concerns

Explore Further on the Internet

source : http://www.laits.utexas.edu/~norman/BUS.FOR/course.mat/Alex/

How Data Mining Works

How exactly is data mining able to tell you important things that you didn't know or what is going to happen next? The technique that is used to perform these feats in data mining is called modeling. Modeling is simply the act of building a model in one situation where you know the answer and then applying it to another situation that you don't. For instance, if you were looking for a sunken Spanish galleon on the high seas the first thing you might do is to research the times when Spanish treasure had been found by others in the past. You might note that these ships often tend to be found off the coast of Bermuda and that there are certain characteristics to the ocean currents, and certain routes that have likely been taken by the ship’s captains in that era. You note these similarities and build a model that includes the characteristics that are common to the locations of these sunken treasures. With these models in hand you sail off looking for treasure where your model indicates it most likely might be given a similar situation in the past. Hopefully, if you've got a good model, you find your treasure.

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