| What is Data Mining? |
In Simple Terms...Congratulations!! You have just spent a fortune to purchase a vast piece of land up on a mountain slope! You did so, because, apart from the apparent real estate value, you received a tip that somewhere in the depths of that area there is a great amount of ore deposits. However, the people who were so keen to inform you, omitted to tell you HOW you can extract the precious ore and produce real profit... A business man who invests his money on a database system or a data warehouse is practically at the same position. He has no problem realizing the obvious value of data storing and maintaining, but he has no clue when it comes to data analysis. How can he extract useful knowledge which can increase business profit?
Data mining aims to assist on exactly this part. It creates the necessary "mines" and provides the appropriate tools, whose purpose is to extract the valuable ore and deliver the purified product to their master. The mined ore may be gold or silver, but it might be coal as well. There is no way you can tell before you dig. Whatever the case, though, the smart and proper use of any type of ore can offer significant benefits to various sectors of business structure and operation... DefinitionIn literature, Data mining is often described as "the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data" [1] and "the science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases" [2]. Data mining in relation to enterprise resource planning is the statistical and logical analysis of large sets of transaction data, looking for patterns that can aid decision making [3]. |