I. Introduction to Data Mining? Data mining, the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases, is a powerful new technology with great potential to help companies focus on the most important information in their data warehouses. Data mining is the computer-assisted process of digging through and analyzing enormous sets of data and then extracting the meaning of the data. Data mining tools predict behaviors and future trends, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. Data mining tools can answer business questions that traditionally were too time consuming to resolve. They scour databases for hidden patterns, finding predictive information that experts may miss because it lies outside their expectations. Generally, Data mining 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. Then, Data mining is the exploration and analysis of large quantities of data in order to discover meaningful patterns and rules. The goal of data mining is to allow a corporation to improve its marketing, sales, and customer support operations through a better understanding of its customers. Data mining comes in two flavors directed and undirected. Directed data mining attempts to explain or categorize some particular target field such as income or response. Undirected data mining attempts to find patterns or similarities among groups of records without the use of a particular target field or collection of predefined classes. Data mining is primarily used day by day comprise with a strong consumer focus retail, financial, communication & marketing organizations. It enables this companies to determine relationships among internal factors such as price, product positioning or staff skills & external factors such as economic indicators, competition & customer demographics.
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