What is data mining?

Here are some important Data Mining definitions:

Mining means extracting something to find out important result. e.g. mining earth for extracting diamond, gold or coal. Data mining is an interdisciplinary sub-field of computer science. It is the computational process of discovering patterns in large data sets. Data mining tools predict about future trends and customers behaviors.

Data mining (sometimes it is called as data or knowledge discovery) is the process of extraction of raw data for different perspectives and transforming it into useful information. Further this information can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. This helps to most of companies to focus on the most important information and allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions.

Data mining is goal of extraction of patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data, not only the extraction of data. It is also information processing which include collections, extraction, warehousing, analysis, and statistics of data.

Uses of data mining:

Data mining has been used in many applications. Some of the notable examples where data mining can be used are business, medicine, science, and surveillance. 

Data mining mostly used for business to analyse the historical business activities, stored as static data in data warehouse databases. Main goal is to reveal hidden patterns and trends to discover unknown strategic business information to increase business and revenue.

Data mining has been widely used widely in the areas of science and engineering field, such as bioinformatics, genetics, medicine, education and electrical power engineering.

Spatial data mining is the application of data mining methods to spatial data. Data mining offers great potential benefits for GIS-based applied decision-making and there are so many more examples where data mining is used now days.

Sources of data for mining:

World going toward digital, data is increasing in size day by day and it is difficult to store this data.

Some of the below sources that is increasing data day by day in our daily life.

1. Real time data captured in one electronic system (e.g. CCTV, Cameras, and Satellites)
2. Government reports
3. Historical data and information
4. Mass media products
5. Web information
6. Social media sites
7. Government Official statistics
8. Observation
9. Medical or scientific research data