Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data. Data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information. It is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery. Therefore data mining is not foolproof but may be useful if sufficiently representative data samples are collected. The discovery of a particular pattern in a particular set of data does not necessarily mean that a pattern is found elsewhere in the larger data from which that sample was drawn. An important part of the process is the verification and validation of patterns on other samples of data.
Notable uses:
- Games
- Business
- Science and engineering: In recent years, data mining has been widely used in area of science and engineering, such as bioinformatics, genetics, medicine, education and electrical power engineering.
- Spatial data mining
- Surveillance